Conjoint recognition studies have revealed that episodic memory is subadditive over mutually exclusive reality states (e.g., old vs. new), which is known as overdistribution. Because overdistribution violates the additive law of probability, it has stimulated the development of quantum memory models, which implement the distinction between verbatim and gist traces of experience. Recent versions of those models treat verbatim and gist memory as incompatible knowledge states that obey the Bohr complementarity principle, which specifies that these states can only be accessed sequentially. An extreme form of subadditivity, super-over-distribution, falls out of this incompatibility assumption, and we report the first evidence of it. Super-over-distribution occurs when it is easier to remember that items belong to a subordinate reality state than to remember that they belong to a super-ordinate state that contains it. Quantum memory models identify conditions under which this paradoxical phenomenon should occur and the classes of items that are more vs. less likely to exhibit it. Super-over-distribution was detected in three lines of research and, as expected, was more pronounced for some classes of items than for others.
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