The Context Cuing Effect On Source Retrieval In Multidimensional Source Memory

The encoding specificity principle (Tulving & Thompson, 1973) advanced that memory performance is affected by the degree of overlap between the learning context and the test context. Retrieval is facilitated when test conditions match encoding conditions, and this is the so called "context cuing effect". But so far, most studies in this area focus on the context cuing effect on item memory, few researches were conducted on the context cuing effect on source memory.Some researches found that the context cuing effect in item recognition were quite unstable. There are two major different explanations to this phenomenon. One of them proposed that only when the "ensemble information" meaningfully integrated and bind uniquely with the item information , it could be an effective context cue to the item memory. Another viewpoint proposed that the context cue provided at test is useful only when participant can't reinstate the cue internally, that is the context cuing effect only shows when the memory task is very difficult. Based on these two theories, the present study was conducted to examine in what kind of conditions the context cuing effect does appear in multidimensional source memory.In all experiment 1, 2 and 3, three cue load conditions (1:1, 1:2, 1:3) and three cue validity conditions (match, mismatch, new) was arranged, but in each experiment there were different retrieval cues and targets. In experiment 1, background color was used as the context cue and item location was used as the retrieval target; in experiment 2, background color was used as the cue to the background shape dimension; while in experiment 3, the item orientation was used as the cue to the item location dimension.The results are as follows:(1) For item recognition, obvious context cuing effect showed when cue load was low, and the cuing effect became weaker when cue load got higher.(2) In source memory, obvious context cuing effect also showed when cue load is low, and it became weaker when cue load got higher too.(3) In multidimensional source memory, the relationship between the cuing source and the target source directly influenced the effect of context cues. While background color could not become the context cue to the location source (Experiment 1), it could be used as a effective cue to the background shape source (Experiment 2), and the orientation information was a good context cue to the location source (Experiment 3).(4) There was an increase in the difficulty of test task with a decrease in cue load.Based on experiment 2 and 3, experiment 4 perfectly controlling the difficulty of diffrenent tasks at the same level, only manipulated two variables: the cue load condition (1:1, 1:3) and the cue validity conditions (match, mismatch, new). The result also showed that there was a strong context cuing effect on source memory, indicating that the task difficulty was the most important factor affecting the context cuing effect on source memory.