The role of stimulus familiarity in context-dependent recognition

Investigations of context-dependent recognition, a phenomenon in which recognition is better for items studied and tested with the same rather than different context, have shown serious inconsistencies. A simple organization of (1) contextual cues, distinguishing between local context (specific cues) and global context (general cues), and (2) stimulus familiarity, distinguishing between novel and familiar stimuli, reduces much of this variability. In two experiments, changes in both local context (descriptive label) and global context (environment) were manipulated in order to examine their effects on recognition memory for faces that differed in familiarity. Changes in local context impaired recognition of both unfamiliar and familiar faces; changes in environmental context impaired recognition only of unfamiliar faces. These results are consistent with the many failures to find impaired recognition of verbal stimuli under changed environmental contexts, and they suggest that stimulus familiarity is a critical parameter modulating environmental context effects.