Context effects (Psychology)

This experiment investigated an individual's memory of specific motion events, unique actor, intrinsic motion, and extrinsic motion combination. Intrinsic motions involve the movement of an individual's body parts in a specific manner to move around, while extrinsic motions specify a path in reference to an external object. Participants viewed video clips, each depicting an actor performing a unique extrinsic and intrinsic motion combination. One week later, they viewed a different series of retrieval video clips consisting of old (identical to encoding), extrinsic conjunction (extrinsic motion previously performed by different actor), intrinsic conjunction (intrinsic motion previously performed by different actor), and new (novel extrinsic or intrinsic motion) video clips. Participants responded "yes" to viewing the old video clips the most often, followed by conjunction video clips, and then new video clips. Furthermore, there were a greater number of "yes" event memory recognition responses for extrinsic conjunction items than intrinsic conjunction items.

Mistakes in combining components of stimuli are called binding or memory conjunction errors. They occur when people mistakenly associate two previously seen stimulus features that were not previously seen together. It is hypothesized that bizarre items will be better remembered than common items. Participants saw 18 continuous events, each containing four actions performed by four different actors. One week later they returned for a recognition test and were shown more video clips. There were old, new action, and conjunction items. A conjunction item was composed of a familiar actor performing a familiar action that had previously been performed by someone else. For each clip, participants were asked if they saw this person perform this action before. Participants responded "yes" to conjunction same context items more often than they did to conjunction different context items.