Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The idea that compositing or blending may occur in human episodic memory stems from two sources: (1) distributed models of human memory, and (2) studies that have focussed on the distortions and mistakes that occur in eyewitness testimony. In this paper,data that have been uncovered within the eyewitness testimony paradigm are simulated by a distributed memory model-CHARM (composite holographic associative recall memory). Studies done by Loftus have been interpreted as indicating that blending does occur; modification of these experiments conducted by McCloskey and Zaragosa have been claimed to refute Loftus' interpretation. It is shown that both of these results are predicted by the composite-trace model.