Author's personal copy Psychologie française 59 (2014) 231–246 Disponible en ligne sur www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect et également disponible sur www.em-consulte.com Original article Non-abstractive global-matching models: A framework for investigating the distinctiveness effect on explicit and implicit memory Les modèles d’appariement global non abstractifs : un cadre pour l’investigation de l’effet de distinctivité dans la mémoire explicite et implicite A. Oker a,* , R. Versace b a EA 4047, laboratoire d’études cliniques et innovations thérapeutiques en psychiatrie (ECIPSY), université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, 177, rue de Versailles, 78157 Le Chesnay, France b EA 3082, laboratoire d’étude des mécanismes cognitifs (EMC), université de Lyon, 5, avenue Pierre-Mendès-France, 69676 Bron cedex, France a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 23 May 2013 Accepted 10 April 2014 Keywords: Distinctiveness Implicit memory Explicit memory Memory traces Dissociation a b s t r a c t One very well-known memory phenomenon is the observation that if a specific item seems to be different or rare in any way from other items present in the same encoding context, this item is likely to be remembered more accurately. This phenomenon, named the von Restorff effect or the isolation effect, has been known since 1933 and been considered today as one of the possible ways to create distinctiveness. The aim of this article is to report that the current debate concerning its non-emergence in implicit memory tasks is directly due to a theoretical disagreement about the nature of human memory. In this paper, we conclude that non-abstractive global-matching models can provide an effective theoretical frame- work for the study of the distinctiveness effect with isolation both in implicit and explicit memory tasks. © 2014 Société franc ¸ aise de psychologie. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: ali.oker@uvsq.fr (A. Oker), remy.versace@univ-lyon2.fr (R. Versace). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psfr.2014.04.001 0033-2984/© 2014 Société franc ¸ aise de psychologie. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.