An illusory correlation (IC) is the erroneous perception that two actually uncorrelated categories are correlated. The Shared Distinctiveness Approach (SDA) explains ICs with heightened accessibility of distinctive category combinations in episodic memory. However, empirical evidence for this approach is heterogeneous. In the present event-related potential (ERP) study, we exploited the fact that more distinctive items elicit larger P300 responses than less distinctive items, which potentially predict subsequent memory performance differences for such items. Distinctiveness at encoding was created by presenting words that differed from frequently presented, positive words in valence, font color, or both. We hypothesized that shared distinctiveness (deviation in both color and valence) would lead to an enhanced P300 subsequent memory effect (SME), better source memory performance, and an overestimation of the frequency of shared distinctive items. Behavioral results indicated the presence of shared distinctiveness effects on source memory and frequency estimation. Unexpectedly, memory also was enhanced for positive items in the frequent color. This pattern also was reflected in the P300 for highly positive and negative items. However, shared distinctiveness did not modulate the P300 SME, indicating that the processing of distinctive features might only indirectly contribute to better encoding. This study shows that shared distinctiveness indeed is associated with better source memory and ICs. Because effects were observed for the most frequent and the least frequent category combination, our results imply that the processing of distinctiveness might involve attention allocation to diametrical category combinations, thereby accentuating the differences between the categories.

虚幻的相关性 (IC) 是错误地认为两个实际上不相关的类别是相关的。共享独特性方法 (SDA) 解释了在情景记忆中具有更高的独特类别组合可访问性的 IC。然而，这种方法的经验证据是异质的。在目前的事件相关电位 (ERP) 研究中，我们利用了这样一个事实，即更独特的项目比不太独特的项目引起更大的 P300 反应，这可能预测此类项目随后的记忆性能差异。编码的独特性是通过呈现与经常呈现的、在效价、字体颜色或两者兼而有之的正面词不同的词来创建的。我们假设共享的独特性（颜色和价态的偏差）会导致增强的 P300 后续记忆效应（SME），更好的源记忆性能，以及高估共享独特项目的频率。行为结果表明存在对源记忆和频率估计的共享独特性影响。出乎意料的是，对于频繁颜色的积极项目，记忆也得到了增强。这种模式也反映在高度正面和负面项目的 P300 中。然而，共享显着性并没有调节 P300 SME，表明显着性特征的处理可能只是间接地有助于更好的编码。这项研究表明，共享独特性确实与更好的源内存和 IC 相关。因为观察到最频繁和最不频繁的类别组合的影响，