Effects of initial context processing on long-term memory

Abstract

The effects of environmental context on the recall of information were studied in three experiments in which context was manipulated by changing rooms between study and test, with subjects learning a list of words in one room and later recalling it in the same environmental context or in a different one. Additionally, half of the subjects were instructed to pay extra attention to the study room at the time of learning the words, and half received standard instructions that did not explicitly focus their attention on room-processing. Context manipulation did not affect memory performance when the retention interval was short (10 minutes in Experiment 1), but showed reliable effects with longer retention intervals (1 week in Experiment 2, and 1 month in Experiment 3). In these two experiments, standard encoding instructions led to the usual context effects, with lower recall in the different-context condition. However, extra encoding conditions facilitated recall even when the context was different at retrieval. These findings are discussed in relation to recent theoretical developments.