Towards a Unified Theory of Memory for Similar Episodes

Important advances have been made in understanding the roles that recollection and familiarity, true and false memory, as well as pattern separation and pattern completion play in episodic memory, using various paradigms that examine memory for lures that are similar - but not identical - to prior episodes. However, research using each of these paradigms has remained largely isolated, and a coherent theoretical integration is lacking. In this perspective paper, we argue that false recognition in these paradigms can be understood within a unified theory in which memory performance reflects the operation of three distinct processes: false recollection, false familiarity, and recollection rejection. Our proposed approach leverages the theoretical insights provided by parameter estimates derived from receiver operating characteristic analyses of recognition memory confidence. Using extant data from paradigms across all three literatures that collected recognition confidence judgments, we show that this analytic approach can be used to measure each process. Our findings bridge the existing literatures by showing that these three memory processes are functionally distinct and that they underly performance in each experimental paradigm. This new approach overcomes key limitations of earlier methods by separating common memory and decision processes across paradigms, and it provides new opportunities to further understand why factors such as healthy aging disrupts the ability to discriminate between similar episodes.