LAUSR

Whereas both human and animal lesion and human neuroimaging studies have implicated the hippocampus in memory for associations, some studies find preserved associative memory following hippocampal damage. Starting with a classic summed similarity model of item recognition, we can account for associative recognition without assuming a specific hippocampally-mediated associative process. We add one key assumption: that one item can influence activation of another item's features. Feature-strength patterns, evaluated for each probe item individually, are then diagnostic of whether an item was paired with one item versus another. We suggest that feature-level inference, without explicit storage of associations, may play a critical role in associative recognition tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).