Turning up the noise or turning down the volume? On the nature of the impairment of episodic recognition memory by midazolam

E. Hirshman, J. Fisher, T. Henthorn, J. Arndt, and A. Passannante (2002) found that Midazolam disrupts the mirror-patterned word-frequency effect for recognition memory by reversing the typical hit-rate advantage for low-frequency words. They noted that this result is consistent with dual-process accounts (e.g., R. C. Atkinson & J. F. Juola, 1974; G. Mandler, 1980; A. P. Yonelinas, 1994) of the word-frequency effect for recognition memory (S. Joordens & W. E. Hockley, 2000; L. M. Reder et al., 2000). The present authors show that this finding is also consistent with a variety of single-process, retrieving-effectively-from-memory (REM) models (R. M. Shiffrin & M. Steyvers, 1997), the simplest of which assumes that Midazolam decreases the accuracy with which memory traces are stored. These findings therefore do not discriminate between single- and dual-process models of recognition memory.