NONVERBAL LOCAL CONTEXT CUES EXPLICIT BUT NOT IMPLICIT MEMORY

Memory research distinguishes two components of episodes-the event or item and the spatial-temporal setting or context in which it occurred. The word context is used either globally to denote the physical, soci al, or emotional environment at study and test or it is used locally t o refer to another word or picture that was paired with a particular t arget. In this article, we report four experiments that investigated t he influence of two different nonverbal local contexts on explicit wor d recognition and implicit word identification test performance. In ea ch experiment, university students studied words that were displayed a gainst various extra-item local contexts, and the contexts were either the same or different at study and test. What differed across experim ents was the nature of the contexts: for Experiments 1 and 2, it was a band of color that stretched across the computer screen, and for Expe riments 3 and 4, the context was a colored line drawing. The combined findings from all experiments provide no evidence of memory context ef fects (MCE) on priming. By contrast, recognition test performance show ed reliable MCEs but only when the local context was a concrete drawin g or when it was a color that was target-related or appropriate. The d iscussion compared these findings with those from previous studies tha t concerned the cueing effectiveness of verbal and nonverbal extra-ite m contexts. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.