Reinstatement of Context

The Task and Phenomenon

Bain & Humphreys (1989, pg. 229) report an experiment which clearly demonstrates the difference between episodic and generalized matching tasks by reinstating the context during some, but not all, of the test conditions.

Subjects were given a set of words and asked to produce a synonym for each. One week later the same subjects were given a passage containing unhighlighted target words, and asked to read the text and then answer questions on it. Half of the target words were common to both training stages. In addition to the test items already mentioned (synonym, passage, or both), words which appeared in neither training stage were also included as test items. Each set of test items contained equal numbers of high and low frequency words.

The subjects were grouped into three test conditions. Group A was asked to give a general familiarity rating for the words (a generalized matching condition). Group B was asked to recognise which words had been in the synonym generation task (an episodic matching condition). Group C was asked to recognise which words had been in the passage reading task (also an episodic matching condition). The mean recognition and familiarity ratings are displayed in Figure 1.

Insert figure 1

As Figure 1 shows, subjects performing the episodic matching tasks were affected by the training context indicated in the task instructions, while subjects performing the general matching task were not influenced by the prior training conditions. Furthermore, the subjects did not have trouble reinstating the synonym context as opposed to the passage context, and vice versa.

The Model

Exercises