When unfamiliarity matters: Changing environmental context between study and test affects recognition memory for unfamiliar stimuli

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.