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