ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews what is known about the role of associative processes in causing false recognition and false recall. It delimits one's subject matter to include only experiments using lists of associated words. The concept of association is central to an understanding of human memory. The contribution of the present chapter is to review evidence that strong associations, long known to facilitate remembering, can create memory illusions as well. Errors have often been considered a nuisance in the study of memory and thought to be useful only for correcting hit rates in recall or recognition by factoring out the false alarms assumed to arise through guessing. Psychologists interested in those topics have studied perceptual illusions for 150 years and realised that an understanding of veridical perception demands a parallel explanation of illusions. Perceptual illusions have been a fertile ground for developing and testing theories of perceiving; the time is ripe for the systematic study of illusions of memory, as well.
