Evidence of a negative environmental reinstatement effect

Abstract

Experiment 1 investigated the suggestion that the effect of reinstating the encoding environment at the time of memory retrieval is most likely to influence performance positively when other retrieval cues are not readily available. It was predicted that a positive environmental reinstatement effect would be more likely in college students' memory for a list of words presented in booklet format than for a passage of prose because the inherent organizational structure of the passage would provide a framework for retrieval and make environmental cues relatively unimportant. However, recall of both types of material was greater in the condition in which study and test took place in different environments (p < ·05). In Expt 2, this same negative environmental reinstatement effect was found using auditory presentation of the word list (p < ·05). The results suggest that reinstating the encoding context at the time of retrieval may under certain conditions prompt reliance on overloaded environmental cues at the expense of other potentially more effective retrieval strategies.

The effects of the cognitive interview and other methods of context reinstatement on identification

“…They are problematic mainly because they are capricious (see Bjork and Richardson-Klavehn, 1989). While a number of factors have been cited as relevant, such as characteristics of the to-beremembered target (Wilhite, 1991), the manner of encoding (McDaniel, Anderson, Einstein and O'Halloran, 1989), the nature of the retrieval test (Smith, Glenberg and Bjork, 1978), the ease with which subjects can reinstate the original encoding context (Smith and Vela, 1992) and the duration of the retention interval (Cutler, Penrod, O'Rourke and Martens, 1986), the main source of difficulty in the issue of context effects is undoubtedly at the conceptual level. That is, just what constitutes context, and an effective context reinstatement manipulation?…”

Mood as a mediator of place dependent memory.

“…Although widely recognized and well researched, the problem of unreliability has thus far resisted resolution. Current conjecture is that place dependence is regulated by a broad range of factors, including (a) characteristics of the to-be-remembered or target events (Wilhite, 1991); (b) the manner in which they are encoded (McDaniel, Anderson, Einstein, & O'Halloran, 1989); (c) the nature of the retrieval test (Smith, Glenberg, & Bjork, 1978); (d) whether the events are construed as being causally related to, rather than simply contiguous with, a given environment (Fernandez & Glenberg, 1985); (e) whether the events are envisioned as interacting with the environment or as isolated visual images (Eich, 1985); (f) the ease with which participants, at retrieval, can mentally reinstate the original encoding context (Smith, 1979); and (g) the duration of the retention interval (Smith, 1988). Although clearly plausible and probably contributory, these factors provide only a partial understanding of why place dependence sometimes conies, sometimes goes.…”

Using virtual reality to understand context-dependent spatial memory

“…Overloading of cues has been frequently cited as an explanation for the unreliability of environmental context-dependent memory in studies using words as targets and environmental contexts as cues (Isarida & Isarida, 2007;Rutherford, 2004;Wilhite, 1991). A clear illustration of the cue overloading account can be seen from Wilhite's (1991) experiment, in which participants were assessed on their recall for random word lists or a fixed paragraph in either the encoding room or a novel room.…”

“…Overloading of cues has been frequently cited as an explanation for the unreliability of environmental context-dependent memory in studies using words as targets and environmental contexts as cues (Isarida & Isarida, 2007;Rutherford, 2004;Wilhite, 1991). A clear illustration of the cue overloading account can be seen from Wilhite's (1991) experiment, in which participants were assessed on their recall for random word lists or a fixed paragraph in either the encoding room or a novel room. It was assumed that learning words would rely largely on the ambient environmental context due to the shortage of useful cues, whereas learning the paragraph would depend lesser on the environmental context since its organizational structure functioned as an effective cue.…”