Year: 2013
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Associative recognition memory and context effects are two lines of research that exist in parallel with little cross talk.Associative recognition tasks ask participants to distinguish the studied associations oftwo or more items from novel or rearranged associations (e.g., Cohn & Moscovitch, 2007; Craik & Schloerscheidt, 2011), whereas context effect studies have shown that the recognition of an individual object is enhanced when presented in its original context (e.g., Hollingworth, 2006;Hayes, Nadel, & Ryan, 2007).Our study investigated whether familiarity or recollection supports both associative recognition and context effects through the use of a speeded recognition test.In two experiments, a response deadline did not change the size ofthe context effect or reduce discrimination of old and rearranged items, indicating that both tasks might rely on familiarity.This occurred both when participants had to engage in associative recognition as it is traditionally studied (discriminating old and rearranged pairings) and when the task asked to discriminate familiar and novel objects and backgrounds.In both studies, a reliable context effect was observed.The results suggest that context effects for object recognition rely on familiarity, which indicates that object and background might be encoded as one coherent representation, not as individual entities (Hayes, Nadel, & Ryan, 2007;Levy, Rabinyan, &Vakil, 2008).
Author: Chi T. Ngo
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W413328540