A forced-choice recognition paradigm was employed to test hypotheses regarding memory for information that is consistent or inconsistent with basic-level category representations. Slides and descriptive statements portraying nine stimulus characters were presented to subjects under impression-formation instructions. A subsequent recognition task required subjects to choose which one of a pair of stimulus slides had initially been described by the statement given as a cue for that trial. The “stimulus triad” (statement cue and two slide choices) for each trial was systematically structured in terms of basic category consistency and superordinate category consistency of the relationships among these three stimulus elements. Results from this recognition-accuracy task are compared with earlier reported findings of category-consistency effects in recall (Brewer, Dull, & Lui, 1981). The overall pattern of results from both measures indicates that memory for consistent information is category-based, but that memory for category-inconsistent information is highly individuated. An associative network model is proposed to represent the different memory structures for category-consistent and category-inconsistent information.
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Lui et al. (1983) studied this question.