Grant et al. (1998) Context-dependent memory

AIM:

To show matching learning and recall environment can lead to improved performance on a memory test.

BACKGROUND:

 Observations show students study material in environments much noisier e.g. friends or television, than quiet exam rooms. If context-dependency occurs then study habits could be harming test score. performance.

PROCEDURE LAB EXPERIMENT:

 39 ppts, age 17-56 (M=23.4, SD=5.9), 17f and 23m. Recruited by eight members of psychology lab class serving as experimenters who chose 5 participants each.

INDEPENDENT MEASURES DESIGN

IV:  1. silent reading + silent test 2. silent reading + noisy test 3. noisy reading + noisy test 4. noisy reading + silent test.

DV:

Performance on (a) a short-answer recall test and (b) a multiple-choice recall test.

Procedure:

Each experimenter ran one participant for each of the four conditions and an additional participant for one of the conditions as assigned by the instructor. Ppts are randomly assigned to conditions.

• Given cassette player and headphones with identical background noise tape. Of lunchtime in a university cafeteria.

• Two-page, three-column, article on psychoimmunology (Hales, 1984) was selected as the studied material.

• 16 multiple-choice questions and 10 short-answer using the same multiple-choice stems answerable by a single word. A short test was given first to ensure recall of the article tested not recall of info from multiple choices.

• Instructions read aloud: described the experiment as a class project and stated taking part was voluntary. Asked to read the given article once, as if reading an assignment, and allowed to highlight and underline.

• All wore headphones but the silent condition told wouldn’t hear anything while the noisy condition told us to ignore the noise.

• Reading times were recorded. Two minutes later short answer test was given followed by multiple choice.

• At the end, participants were debriefed concerning the purpose of the experiment. The entire procedure lasted about 30 minutes.

RESULTS QUANTITATIVE DATA: SR = silent reading, ST = silent test, NR = noisy reading, NT = noisy test.

• One person removed due to extremely poor score.  All spent roughly equal amounts of time studying material.

• Multiple Choice: mean scores out of 15: SR + ST = 14.3 while SR + NT = 12.7; NR + NT = 14.3 while NR + ST = 12.7.

• Short answer: mean scores out of 10: SR + ST = 6.7 while SR + NT = 4.6; NR + NT = 6.2 while NR + ST = 5.4.

CONCLUSIONS:

• Studying and testing in the same environment leads to enhanced performance.

• Students are likely to perform better in exams if they study for them with a minimum of background noise because, there was evidence for context-dependency suggesting they are better off matching the actual test conditions.