The Enigma of Organization and Distinctiveness

The concepts of organization and distinctiveness are considered important to memory. Yet, examination of research related to these concepts reveals conceptual inconsistency and confusion. We suggest that the problem can be traced to the use of similarity and difference as explanations and further suggest that adoption of a theory of similarity judgment as the description of encoding ameliorates the problem. The approach is illustrated by showing that Medin, Goldstone, and Gentner′s ( Psychological Review, in press) theory of similarity judgment allows simultaneous organizational and distinctive processing. Reinstatement of these processes at retrieval produces unique convergence on a particular item and completes the description of the simultaneous importance of relational and distinctive processing of a particular item. The idea is applied to research directly related to organization and distinctiveness, and to the less obviously related phenomena of hypermnesia, generation effectsm, proactive interference, prose recall, and self-referent encoding.