Are mnemonic failures and benefits two sides of the same coin?: Investigating the real-world consequences of individual differences in memory integration.

Theories of reconstructive memory have long been influenced by investigations of false recognition errors, in which old/new judgements are compromised by spontaneous activation of associated but nonpresented concepts. Recent evidence similarly suggests that reconstructive memory processes (so-called memory integration) also support positive learning behaviors, such as inferential reasoning. Despite prevailing hypotheses, the question of whether a common integration process underlies these seemingly disparate mnemonic outcomes is not well understood. To address this question, young adults, recruited from two institutions, completed the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (Deese, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 17-22, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(4), 803-814, 1995) and Bransford and Franks (Cognitive Psychology, 2, 331-350, 1971) false recognition paradigms, as well as an inferential paradigm (Varga & Bauer, Memory & Cognition, 45, 1014-1027, 2017b), all of which depend on integration of related information in memory. Across two experiments, the well-established tasks were adapted such that successful memory integration resulted in the same negative outcome (i.e., false recognition; Experiment 1) or positive outcome (i.e., inferential reasoning; Experiment 2). By capturing variability in item-to-item responding within and among tasks for each person, a common memory integration process was found to elicit positive and negative consequences in paradigms that required the combination of individual units to construct a composite understanding, but only when memory for directly learned and novel, integrated items were modeled together. Furthermore, linking task-related behavior to academic performance revealed that a greater propensity to integrate factual information (but not arbitrary materials) was related to higher SAT scores. Together, these results provide evidence for domain-general and domain-specific reconstructive mechanisms and their role in supporting educational success beyond the laboratory.