Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To avoid interference among similar memory traces it is re-quired to form complex memory structures that include mul-tiple components of the event, which helps one to distinguishone event from another. In a laboratory setting, these complexbinding structures have been studied through a paradigm whereone has to form a memory structure that includes two items andthe context together (i.e., three-way binding). However, de-spite the long history of the theoretical concept, its importance,and the existence of the laboratory paradigm, three-way bind-ing structures have only been examined in recall paradigms.Moreover, not all memory models consider the ability to formthree-way binding structures as a default. Therefore, the cur-rent study examined the use and formation of three-way bind-ing structures in an associative recognition paradigm. Resultsprovide evidence that three-way binding structures are usedduring recognition, which implies that it is critical for mem-ory models to properly represent them.