Associative and familiarity-based effects of environmental context on memory

Previous research has shown that hit and false alarm rates and claims of remembering are greater when test items are shown in the same context that was present at study. In the present article, the effects of environmental context (photographs of scenes shown in the background) were evaluated in a yes-no recognition task when context was manipulated on the computer screen compared with when subjects were wearing virtual reality glasses (Experiment 1), in a forced-choice recognition task to address the question of criterion changes (Experiment 2), and in a free-recall task (Experiment 3) to address the issue of generality. The results show that both specific item-context associations and the familiarity of an old context influence memory performance. We suggest that the effects of environmental context are like other instances of reconstructive memory and can both support and distort recognition memory.