Reminding and false memory: A double-edged sword

Individuals often encounter experiences similar to those they have experienced before. These similarities between experiences can elicit spontaneous remembering, such that the current experience serves as a reminder of previous, similar experiences. Remindings have been deemed beneficial for later recall of related items; however, the consequences of reminding on recognition memory performance in terms of novelty detection remain unclear. By developing a novel variant of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, we investigated the dynamics of novelty detection as a function of explicit similarity-driven reminding and recollection of those remindings. In this paradigm, self-reported remindings were indicated on a trial-by-trial basis at both study and test. We found a pattern of false recognition in line with the DRM literature; however, the ability to accurately detect novelty was moderated by instances of reminding. Indeed, we found that during test, remindings without recollection of the reminded items produced greater false memory for related lures compared to unrelated lures. Interestingly, when related lures induced reminding accompanied by exhaustive recollection of related study items, false alarms were no higher than those for unrelated lures. We interpret this dual consequence of reminding as a function of the interplay between familiarity and recollection, as famously championed by Larry Jacoby (Journal of Memory and Language, 30(5), 513-541, 1991). Moreover, our findings imply that exhaustive recollection of remindings are critical to reducing instances of false memory.