Abstract
Most people can retrieve memory for personally experienced events, but the underlying processes are not well understood. Here we provide the first evidence that base-level activation is an important determinant of episodic memory retrieval. In four experiments, unassociated memory was activated during target retrieval if the unassociated memory had high base-level activation when a recent memory was retrieved as the target. This suggests that a memory with high base-level activation is processed for recent memory retrieval, but not for remote memory retrieval, even if it has no substantial associations with retrieval cues. This finding not only challenges the prevailing view that memory retrieval is executed solely on the basis of cue-to-memory association, but also contributes to elucidating the mechanisms of hippocampus-dependent memory retrieval and its malfunctions.
