A global matching model of choice and response times in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott semantic and perceptual false recognition paradigms

What is arguably the most common method of eliciting false memories in the laboratory is the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm (Deese, 1959; Roediger \& McDermott, 1995), where participants study a set of items that are all similar to a non-presented critical lure. A common finding is that false alarm rates to the critical lures are much higher than to other non-presented items and are in some cases even comparable to hit rates, regardless of whether similarity is defined in terms of semantic or perceptual relations. While there exists a handful of computational models of this paradigm, they have only been applied to semantic but not perceptual false recognition, they have not been fit at the level of individual participants, and they have not been applied to response times (RTs). We present a global matching model that addresses all three of these current gaps. Global similarity of perceptual and semantic representations drives a pair of linear ballistic accumulators, which are used to produce decisions as well as complete RT distributions. In addition to being able to account for heightened false recognition of critical lures, the model was able to account for differences across both individual participants and items, correlations between semantic and perceptual false recognition, differences in false recognition across levels of processing, and heightened false recognition under speed emphasis. These results suggest that both semantic and perceptual false recognition can be explained using only a single retrieval mechanism.