Montagliani and Hockley (2019) presented evidence that item-method directed forgetting not only leads to worse recognition of forget-cued targets than remember-cued targets but also better rejection of foils associated with forget-cued targets than remember-cued targets. Based on that result, they proposed that participants elaboratively encode more category-level information about R-cued targets. We present a retrieval-based explanation of the result within an instance-based memory model. The model imports word representations from two distributional semantic models, latent semantic analysis (LSA) and random permutation model (RPM), into an instance-based model of memory, MINERVA 2. The model reproduced Montagliani and Hockley's results without requiring assumptions about elaborated encoding of category-level information at study. The simulations demonstrate that whereas Montagliani and Hockley's findings are consistent with an account grounded in elaborated encoding of words at study, the results do not force that conclusion. Instead, better encoding of remember-cued targets at study establishes the conditions for retrieval-time effects at test to produce a corresponding influence on false recognition for category-related foils. Our model can be used as a formal tool to think about and study the incidental consequences of item directed forgetting in recognition memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).