When two events occur closely in time, an “association” exists between memories for those events. When a pair of associ- ated events is semantically similar, it is easier to recognize the complete pair and easier to tell the complete pair apart from pairs of events that did not co-occur; there is also, however, a bias to report that similar events had co-occurred, even when they had not. A new experiment shows that these phenomena occur whenever two events share features, whether those fea- tures are perceptual or conceptual in nature and whether the events themselves are verbal or non-verbal. We present a dy- namic model for storage and recognition of associations that shows how all these results can be explained by the princi- ple that shared features lead to correlated processing of similar events, which in turn increases capacity to process associative information.

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