Individual Differences in Mnemonic Discrimination: The Roles of Self-Reported Encoding and Retrieval Quality

Memory specificity is shown in mnemonic discrimination tasks when participants reject lures that are similar to studied objects. Lure rejections may reflect hippocampal pattern separation that encodes objects distinctively, but lure features may also evoke pattern completion that undermines distinctive encoding. This was shown when self-reported encoding promoted both lure rejections and false alarms. Here, we used an experimental and individual differences approach to examine the roles of encoding and retrieval quality interactions in lure classifications. An object recognition task included thought probes during study and retrieval reports after object classifications. On-task reports were associated with lure rejections and false alarms within-subjects as well as bias-corrected lure discrimination and traditional recognition scores between-subjects. Accurate lure and target classifications were more strongly associated with recollection-based retrievals following on- than off-task reports. These results suggest that deeper encoding promoted recollection of criterial features that supported lure classifications by differentiating memories from perceptions.