Self-reported encoding quality promotes lure rejections and false alarms.

The hippocampus supports distinctive encoding, enabling discrimination of perceptions from similar memories. Here, an experimental and individual differences approach examined the role of encoding quality in the classification of similar lures. An object recognition task included thought probes during study and similar lures at test. On-task study reports were associated with lure discrimination in within-subject and between-subjects analyses. Within-subject on-task reports were also associated with false classifications of lures as studied objects. These results are compatible with the view that quality encoding supports memory-based rejection of lures but also engenders false alarms when perceptions and memories are inaccurately compared.