When Unfamiliarity Matters: Changing Environmental Context Between Study and Test Affects Recognition Memory for Unfamiliar Stimuli

Performance in recognition memory has been shown to be relatively insensitive to the effect of environmental context changes between study and test. Recent evidence (P. Dalton, 1993) showed that environmental context changes between study and test affected recognition memory discrimination for unfamiliar stimuli (faces). The present study presented 2 experiments that replicated this finding, refined the experimental methodology, and extended the findings to unfamiliar verbal material (nonwords). Finally, a 3rd experiment showed that contextual changes did not affect recognition memory discrimination for familiar verbal material (words). Overall, the present study provides evidence in favor of context-dependent recognition when the material to be remembered is unfamiliar.