THE EFFECTS OF CUE DISTINCTIVENESS ON ODOR-BASED CONTEXT-DEPENDENT MEMORY

The distinctiveness of an ambient odor was examined in relation to its success as a cue in context-dependent memory. Distinctiveness was exa mined in terms of both cue novelty and contextual appropriateness. Two experiments were conducted in which three different ambient odors tha t varied in familiarity and contextual appropriateness were manipulate d at an incidental word learning encoding session and at a free recall retrieval session 48 h later. Experiment 1 revealed that when a novel ambient odor (osmanthus) was the available context cue, word recall w as better than in any other condition. Further, among familiar odor cu es, recall was better with a contextually inappropriate odor (peppermi nt) than with a contextually appropriate odor (clean fresh pine). Expe riment 2 confirmed that superior word recall with osmanthus and pepper mint depended on the odor cue's being available at both encoding and r etrieval, and that the relation of an odor to the situational context is a key factor for predicting its effectiveness as a retrieval cue.