Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present evidence for a novel relational luring effect (RLE) in recognition memory. Participants performeda continuous associative recognition task in which they had to discriminate between new, old and recombined word pairs.Participants made more false alarms and responded more slowly to lures (TABLE CLOTH) that were relationally similarto studied pairs (FLOOR CARPET). RTs and false alarms for lures increased linearly as the number of previously studieddifferent exemplars of the relation increased (e.g., 0 to 4 previous exemplars). The RLE effect was stronger for relations thatwere represented by exemplars that were more typical of the relation. These results suggest that semantic relations exist asindependent representations in LTM, and that during associative recognition these representations can be a spurious source offamiliarity. The RLE has implications for models of semantic and episodic memory, unitization in associative recognition,analogical reasoning, and constructive memory research.