Environmental context change affects memory for performed actions

Abstract

The current study investigated the effect of environmental context change between the study and test on the recall of action phrases that either were performed during encoding (subject-performed tasks, SPTs) or were verbally encoded (verbal tasks, VTs). Both SPTs and VTs showed the same magnitude of impaired recall when the study and test contexts mismatched. Furthermore, changing the context between the two study lists reduced cross-list intrusion errors compared to encoding the lists in the same context. Both SPTs and VTs benefited from studying the lists in different contexts as evidenced by reduced intrusions. Taken together, the results suggest that SPTs are integrated with their context because they suffered when context changed between the study and test, and they also benefited when they were performed in two environments versus the same environment.