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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

false recognition, memory performance, long-term memory system

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Psychology

Abstract

Our long-term memory system has the impressive ability to form unique representations of events and later retrieve those distinct events with minimal interference from similar events. For example, you may park in the same parking lot everyday, but in a different spot each time. Most days, you can remember specifically where you are parked even though each encounter is very similar and thus might interfere with all the others. Computational models of brain functioning propose that this ability depends on the complementary processes of pattern separation and pattern completion. Pattern separation is the process whereby overlapping representations (of, for example, two similar events or stimuli) are made as dissimilar as possible. Pattern completion, on the other hand, is the process whereby previously encoded representations are retrieved given a degraded or noisy cue.

Included in

Psychology Commons

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