Although episodic and semantic memory share overlapping neural mechanisms, it remains unclear how our pre-existing semantic associations modulate the formation of new, episodic associations. When freely recalling recently studied words, people rely on both episodic and semantic associations, shown through temporal and semantic clustering of…

The authors report a new theory of false memory building upon existing associative memory models and implemented in fSAM, the first fully specified quantitative model of false recall. Participants frequently intrude unstudied critical words while recalling lists comprising their strongest semantic associates but infrequently produce other…

When asked to recall the words from a just-presented target list, subjects occasionally recall words that were not on the list. These intrusions either appeared on earlier lists (prior-list intrusions, or PLIs) or had not appeared over the course of the experiment (extra-list intrusions). The authors examined the factors that elicit PLIs in free…