Associative recognition without hippocampal associations.

Whereas both human and animal lesion and human neuroimaging studies have implicated the hippocampus in memory for associations, some studies find preserved associative memory following hippocampal damage. Starting with a classic summed similarity model of item recognition, we can account for associative recognition without assuming a specific hippocampally-mediated associative process. We add one key assumption: that one item can influence activation of another item's features. Feature-strength patterns, evaluated for each probe item individually, are then diagnostic of whether an item was paired with one item versus another. We suggest that feature-level inference, without explicit storage of associations, may play a critical role in associative recognition tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).