Behavioral pattern separation (BPS) paradigms ask participants to discriminate previously encoded (old) stimuli from highly similar (lure) and categorically distinct (novel) stimuli. The lure-old discrimination, thought to uniquely reflect pattern separation in the hippocampal formation, is typically pitted against the traditional novel-old discrimination. However, BPS paradigms have measured lure-old discrimination neither consistently across studies nor in such a way that allows for accurate comparison to novel-old discrimination. Therefore, we advocate for signal detection theory (SDT) as a unified framework. Moreover, we compare SDT with previously used measures of lure-old discrimination, indicating how other formulas' inaccuracies can lead to erroneous conclusions.
Female Humans