A Dynamic Approach to Secondary Processes in Associative Recognition

Associative recognition—the ability to discriminate between studied and novel associations—has been attributed to the operation of a recall-like process that is not engaged during recognition of single items. An alternative mechanism for associative recognition is the formation of a compound memory cue that incorporates relational information between the two elements of the association. These alternatives make different predictions about the dynamics of associative recognition as revealed by speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) functions: if recall were operating, SAT functions should approach asymptotic performance at a faster rate for stronger associations, whereas a compound cue mechanism predicts that only asymptotic performance, not rate, should be affected by strength. In a review of the literature, we find that only asymptotic performance, not rate, is affected by the strength of studied associations, supporting the operation of a compound cue mechanism. We present a formal model of this mechanism as a direct outgrowth of a model of single-item recognition (Cox & Shiffrin, 2012) and use it to predict observed SAT curves for both single-item and associative recognition in a variety of experiments.