R. Russo et al., When unfamiliarity matters: Changing environmental context between study and test affects recognition memory for unfamiliar stimuli, J EXP PSY L, 25(2), 1999, pp. 488-499
Citations number
35
Categorie Soggetti
Psycology
Journal title
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-LEARNING MEMORY AND COGNITION
Performance in recognition memory has been shown to be relatively insensiti
ve to the effect of environmental context changes between study and test. R
ecent evidence (P. Dalton, 1993) showed that environmental context changes
between study and test affected recognition memory discrimination for unfam
iliar stimuli (faces). The present study presented 2 experiments that repli
cated this finding, refined the experimental methodology, and extended the
findings to unfamiliar verbal material (nonwords). Finally, a 3rd experimen
t showed that contextual changes did not affect recognition memory discrimi
nation for familiar verbal material (words). Overall, the present study pro
vides evidence in favor of context-dependent recognition when the material
to be remembered is unfamiliar.