Which insect did you spot in the park, a butterfly or a ladybug? And was it a blue or yellow butterfly? Although people’s memory for visual information is quite remarkable, the fidelity of the representations can be affected by interference. This paper investigated how three types of interference – conceptual relatedness, visual similarity and set size – impact the precision of the representations stored in memory. Results showed a decrement in object recognition for increasing interference. Most interestingly, the ability to discriminate the target object from a visually similar lure was easier when objects were encoded under higher, not lower, conceptual interference. The findings counter a simply additive impact of interference on the fidelity of object representations providing a finer-grained, multi-factorial, understanding of interference mechanisms in memory.
Delhaye, E., D’Innocenzo, G., Raposo, A., & Coco, M. I. (2024). The upside of cumulative conceptual interference on exemplar-level mnemonic discrimination. Memory & Cognition. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-024-01563-2
