Constructing receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) with experimental animals: Cautionary notes
- John T. Wixted1 and
- Larry R. Squire2,3,4
- 1 Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, California 92161, USA;
- 2 Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Diego, California 92161, USA;
- 3 Departments of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology, University of California, San Diego, California 92161, USA
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
A recent article reported findings from an associative recognition memory procedure in which the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) obtained for rats with hippocampal lesions was compared with that of controls (Sauvage et al. 2008). An ROC is a plot of the hit rate (percent correct choices of old items) vs. the false alarm rate (percent incorrect choices of new items) across several biasing conditions. The shape of the ROC for control rats was linear, but it was curvilinear for lesioned rats. These results were interpreted in terms of a particular psychological model (the high-threshold/signal-detection model) (Yonelinas 1994) to mean that rats, like humans, recognize stimuli on the basis of two memory processes (recollection and familiarity) and that hippocampal lesions impair one process (recollection) while enhancing the other (familiarity) (Fig. 1).
Predicted shapes of the ROC if responding were based exclusively on recollection (A) or exclusively on familiarity (B) according …
