Recognition and environmental context: The effect of testing by phone

Abstract

Many experiments have shown that recognition memory is relatively unaffected by changes in environmental testing context. In the experiment reported in this paper, subjects studied a list of words in the laboratory and were tested by surprise by phone when they were at home. The results showed a significant impairment in recognition, relative to recognition by controls tested in the laboratory. This context effect seems to be related to the difficulty that subjects experienced in mentally reinstating the study context. © 1986, Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.