An Individual Difference Study Of Different Cognitive Styles On Context-dependent Memory

The research of context-dependent memory first emerged in 1970s, it refers to such a phenomenon that the focal memories are easier to retrieve when the presented context during retrieval matches with the context which was presented when the event occurred. After several decades' development, the researches have turned from the original investigation on the existence of the effect to the reveal of the generation mechanism and the exploration of the influence factors. As for the former, we have already accumulated a large amount of data, both theoretically and empirically. But there are also some obvious disputes, for example, three main theories of context effect make inconsistent predictions about the role of context as the memory strength of a focal item increases: the outshining hypothesis predicts that context effect will diminish as the memory strength of an item increases, additive global matching models of memory predict that the magnitude of context effect will be unaffected by the memory strength of the item, and the multiplicative global matching models predict that the magnitude of context effect will increase with the strength of the item.The existing experimental results also show that there are many factors which influence the magnitude of the context effect, Such factors may include the type of learning materials, the properties of learning materials, the level of learning, the type of test (Free recall, clue recall, and recognition), the age and the personality (cognitive style) of the subjects, etc.As far as cognitive style(field-dependence/ independence, FDI) is concerned, because it has reflected the differences that how individuals organize and represent information, individuals of different cognitive styles have different ability of cognitive reorganization, as well as the habitual approach of information processing .They may also differ in terms of encoding context information. In perception judging task, field-dependent individuals are easier influenced by external context than field-independent ones, the things should be the same in the course of learning andmemory. As numerous theories of context dependency memory pay more attention to the encoding of the context information in their explanations of the effect, individuals in different cognitive styles may be differentially susceptible to such effect; field-dependent subjects should be less able than field-independent ones to avoid contextual influences in learning, that is, field-dependent subjects should be more affected by learning and memory contexts than field-independent subjects.In the eighties of the 20th century, some researchers (Smith & Roth Kopf, 1984; Smith, 1985a; Kanak & Stevens, 1985) have conducted investigations to this issue. Their experimental results have confirmed the assumptions above: field-dependent subjects showed more context effect than field-independent ones. Smith's (1984) research also found that field-independent subjects were better able to successfully use an imagined context cue to facilitate their memory. But remarkably, all these researches adopted free recall as test method in their studies, and took natural scene as the contextual manipulation. Then, how about the situation in recognition memory which still remains a lot of disputes today? Based on previous researches, we explored this issue by using an AB-X paradigm and presenting stimuli on computer screen, the context were manipulated by changing the physical characteristics (foreground color, background color, and location on a computer screen) of the screen.A series of three experiments is presented here to explore the relationship between cognitive style and context-dependence memory. Experiment 1 was under normal learning paradigm, and experiment 2 was under incidental learning paradigm. In experiment 3, we introduced the R/K procedure which was first adopted by W.J Macken to discuss the differences in Remember and Knowing levels. By varying the strength of stimuli, Experiment 1 and 2 also explored the effects of changes in relative cue...