Abstract
Research on context-mediated facilitation of recognition memory distinguishes between the effects of reinstating the exact same context previously associated with a target and a context that is familiar but not directly associated with the target. As both effects are difficult to produce reliably in recognition experiments, attention has turned to measures that may explain inconsistencies, such as the extent to which instructions encourage association between targets and contexts. The aim of the current study was to examine the distinctive and interactive effects of three factors that may lead to variability in context effects (CEs), namely type of instructions given at learning, delay between learning and test, and exposure time for targets and contexts at learning. Using a comprehensive paradigm developed by Vakil and colleagues, with photographs of faces serving as target and context stimuli, both exposure time and delay were shown to be associated with the occurrence of CEs and appeared to interact with one another in determining the nature of these effects. Unlike several previous studies, false alarms did not increase when foils were presented with familiar contexts. Also unexpectedly, the instruction manipulation did not appear to strengthen target-context binding. It may instead have increased attention to contexts at the expense of targets, as suggested by the finding that direct memory for context improved under associative instruction conditions. Overall, the study demonstrates the importance of understanding and controlling various factors that may potentially influence the emergence of both reinstatement and familiarity-based CEs, among them exposure time and learning-to-test delay.
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Notes
A 6-s exposure time/delayed learning-to-test interval/associative instructions group was not included in the study. We performed preliminary analyses of the data before running the experiment on the final participant group under these conditions and found that our instruction manipulation was unequivocally ineffective in producing any context effects. We therefore chose to omit this group from the design, on the grounds that the data from the two instruction conditions would be collapsed in our examination of the remaining independent variables (exposure time, learning-to-test delay, and context).
As previously noted (see footnote 1), a 6-s exposure time/delayed learning-to-test interval/associative instructions group was not included in the study, such that there were only seven experimental groups.
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Acknowledgements
This study was carried out as part of a Ph.D. dissertation by Ayala Bloch at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel. The authors wish to thank Dr. Tamar Silberg-Salmon for her help while preparing the experiment; to Yael Zilberstein, Adam Laub, and Asaf Morad for their help in collecting the data; and to Sara Robinson for editing and for her advice. The research on which this report is based acknowledges the use of the Extended Multimodal Face Database and associated documentation. Further details of this software can be found in Messer et al. (1999). CVSSP URL: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Research/VSSP/xm2vtsdb.
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The study has been approved by the ethics committee of Bar-Ilan University and has therefore been performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. All participants gave their informed consent prior to their inclusion in the study.
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Bloch, A., Vakil, E. In a context of time: the impact of delay and exposure time on the emergence of memory context effects. Psychological Research 81, 182–190 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0710-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-015-0710-9