Context Effects in Recognition Memory

Abstract

The contribution of contextual information to recognition judgments has a complex history, both theoretically and empirically. Three main theories of context effects in recognition make contrasting predictions about the role of context as the memory strength of a focal item increases: The outshining hypothesis predicts that context effects will diminish as the memory strength of an item increases, additive global matching models of memory predict that the magnitude of context effects will be unaffected by the memory strength of the item, and multiplicative global matching models predict that the magnitude of the context effect will increase with the strength of the item. We reviewed the evidence for each of these theories and conducted 3 experiments consistent with the additive global matching models.