Abstract
The effects of similarity on associative recognition are studied. Participants are more likely to give positive responses in associative recognition when a test pair consists of related words (synonyms, antonyms, or members of the same taxonomic category) than when it consists of unrelated words. This effect is greater on distractors than on targets, thereby leading to a negative effect of within-pair similarity on accuracy. This finding is inconsistent with the conclusion based on previous paired-associate and cued-recall studies that similarity enhances associative memory and may reflect the fact that related pairs are higher-frequency units than are unrelated pairs. A similarity decrement was also found on a test where participants had to remember the order of items in a pair. However, a test on item recognition, in which items were studied individually but tested a pair at a time, led to fewer positive responses to related pairs than to unrelated pairs.
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