[Effects of contextual changes between class and intermission on episodic memory]

Three naturalistic experiments were conducted to investigate the context-dependent memory induced by contextual changes between class and intermission. In all the experiments, junior college students served as subjects. The experimenter in a class session was their teacher, and the experimenters in an intermission session were other students with whom the subjects were acquainted. In Experiment 1, one group of subjects was tested in the same class as encoding, and another group was tested in the intermission at a different place, 60 seconds after their encoding of to-be-remembered items in class. In Experiment 2, the place factor (types of the room) and the non-place factor (class vs. intermission) were orthogonally manipulated. The retention interval was one week. In Experiments 1 and 2, the results revealed clear context-dependent memory. Furthermore, the context-dependent memory was produced by the changes in the non-place component of the context but not by those in the place component. Experiment 3 confirmed that the results were due to the context-dependent memory rather than to any other factors of experimental design.