This study examined the extent to which natural and urban environments and the degree of verbatim memory practice may impact correct recall and memory errors. Middle Eastern college students with extensive but variable memorization-recitation practice (accumulated experience) first viewed a video of a familiar natural environment (desert), an unfamiliar natural environment (forest), or an urban environment. Then they were shown lists of words semantically associated with a concept word which was not presented. Their task was to recall the words of each list. The word lists of Experiment 1 were foreign to the culture of the participants, whereas those of Experiment 2 fitted their cultural background to assess whether cognitive complexity would modulate the effects of current and accumulated experience. In Experiment 1, exposure to a familiar urban environment increased the number of correctly recalled words and along with accumulated verbatim-memory experience reduced the occurrence of intrusions from semantic associates. No effects were observed in Experiment 2. Thus, the cognitive complexity of a memory task can indeed modulate the impact of physical environment and accumulated experience on human memory.
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