The Influence of Reducing Inter-Item Context Cue Formation on Memory Scores (Report‪)‬

Encoding Specificity predicts an increase in memory performance accuracy when features present during the encoding of information are also present during testing (Tulving&Thomson, 1973). These features include contextual cues found in the environment (i.e., context dependent memory; Smith, 1979). To the extent that environmental elements present during encoding overlap those present at test, memory performance is predicted to improve; for example, Mead and Ball (2007) used background music in major or minor keys to produce context dependent memory effects for lists of words. In addition to features in the surrounding environment, context effects have been found for cues that participants encounter while processing the targets themselves, such as words presented on landscape photographs (Hockley, 2008, Experiment 2) or on colored backgrounds (Isarida&Isarida, 2007). It is conceivable that for sets of items, inter-item relationships may also qualify as contextual cues, as studying the same target content repeatedly in the same order may cause particular items to be encoded as part of the context for adjacent items. As is found with other types of contextual cues, this inter-item context would be expected to assist retrieval if the studied order of the target items remained the same on the test. Under these conditions, test scores would reflect retrieval of item information boosted by context-cue assistance. Tests on which the target content is ordered differently from that in which the items were studied would fail to provide these inter-item cues and scores would be expected to decline.