The Context of Memory Retrieval

Subjects read short paragraphs of text and then received an item recognition test. Target words were primed by words from the same sentence, by words from different sentences, or by words that had not appeared in the texts (“foil” primes). Recognition priming occurred but there was no evidence of foil-prime inhibition. These results are difficult to explain in theories of memory in which associative priming is attributed to the presence of primes in retrieval cues, but are consistent with theories in which items and interitem associations are mentally represented independently, and with spreading-activation theories. This conclusion was supported by quantitative tests of the models ACT*, SAM, and TODAM. These models were fit to the present recognition results and to data obtained from other experiments using the lexical decision task. Collectively, the results suggest that memory retrieval may be guided by an object's associations with context but not by context itself.