A global activation approach to the effect of changes in environmental context on recognition.

Abstract

A number of prior studies have not found declines in recognition performance when testing occurs in an environmental context that is different from the learning context. These findings raise serious problems for global activation theories of recognition which predict that hit and false alarm rates will decline when the test context does not match the learning context. Environmental context was manipulated as a unique combination of foreground color, background color, and location on a computer screen in three experiments using intact-rearranged recognition testing and two experiments using single-item testing. Changes in context resulted in reduced hit and false alarm rates as predicted by global activation theories in all five experiments. Mental reinstatement of the learning context was also examined. The results indicated that subjects did not use a mental reinstatement strategy in these experiments.

Successful cuing of gender source memory does not improve location source memory

“…Second, despite source dimensions being associated with learned items, it may also be possible that our encoding procedures did not favor a highly integrated memory trace that includes direct binding of sources. Even though in Experiment 2 we warned people that they would be tested on this information, this may not have prompted a thorough encoding approach that encourages ensemble encoding (e.g., Murnane & Phelps, 1993, 1994. To underscore this point, recent work by Burgess (2013, 2014; see also Horner, Bisby, Bush, Lin, & Burgess, 2015) demonstrated stochastic dependence among triplets of encoded information that were all mutually and focally encoded.…”

Expectancy effects in memory for melodies.

“…Expectancy-like effects, however, are difficult to ignore in research on memory; indeed, the growing concern with the impact of "context" in more recent memory models (e.g., Dalton, 1993;Murnane & Phelps, 1993, 1995 provides an obvious vehicle by which expectancy-based processes are being incorporated into current theories of human memory. In this case, context plays a role by affording a framework through which observers can better integrate and elaborate the to-be-remembered information, thereby increasing the depth of processing of such information, reducing memory load for information, as well as providing a means for anticipating upcoming information.…”

Internal reinstatement hides cuing effects in source memory tasks

“…Therefore, conservative recognition responding leads to better source performance than does liberal responding. Notably, providing a context cue from the study phase can lead to more liberal recognition responding (e.g., Murnane & Phelps, 1993), which would decrease source performance in the cued condition and potentially counteract any boost in source memory provided by the cues. This relationship between recognition bias and source performance also holds for multinomial models, because more liberal recognition responding reflects a greater willingness to guess "old" when item detection fails, and all source responses are guesses in this circumstance (Fig.…”

“…In a classic example, participants recall more words when they are tested in the same room in which they learned the words than when they are tested in a different room (e.g., Smith, 1979). In contrast, many experiments show no effect of context cues on discriminability in recognition and source tasks (Fernandez & Glenberg, 1985;Godden & Baddeley, 1980;Murnane & Phelps, 1993, 1994Smith, Glenberg, & Bjork, 1978;Starns & Hicks, 2005).…”