The effects of context in item-based directed forgetting: Evidence for “one-shot” context storage

• Published in: Memory & cognition 2017-07, Vol.45 (5), p.745-754
• Main Authors: Burgess, Nicole, Hockley, William E., Hourihan, Kathleen L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Cognition; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive Psychology; Experimental psychology; Experiments; Female; Humans; Hypotheses; Information processing; Learning; Male; Memory; Mental Recall - physiology; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Psychology; Reading; Recognition (Psychology) - physiology; Research methodology; Studies; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/s13421-017-0692-5

The effects of context on item-based directed forgetting were assessed. Study words were presented against different background pictures and were followed by a cue to remember (R) or forget (F) the target item. The effects of incidental and intentional encoding of context on recognition of the study words were examined in Experiments 1 and 2 . Recognition memory for the picture contexts was assessed in Experiments 3 a and 3 b. Recognition was greater for R-cued compared to F-cued targets, demonstrating an effect of directed forgetting. In contrast, no directed forgetting effect was seen for the background pictures. An effect of context-dependent recognition was seen in Experiments 1 and 2 , such that the hit rate and the false-alarm rate were greater for items tested in an old compared to a novel context. An effect of context-dependent discrimination was also observed in Experiment 2 as the hit rate was greater for targets shown in their same old study context compared to a different old context. The effects of context and directed forgetting did not interact. The results are consistent with Malmberg and Shiffrin’s ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 322–336, 2005 ) “one-shot” context storage hypothesis that assumes that a fixed amount of context is stored in the first 1 to 2 s of the presentation of the study item. The effects of context are independent of item-based directed forgetting because context is encoded prior to the R or F cue, and the differential processing of target information that gives rise to the directed forgetting effect occurs after the cue.