The roles of remembering and outshining in global environmental context-dependent recognition

The present study investigated whether odor and background-music dependent recognition is best explained by the outshining account, consisting of the encoding-specificity and the outshining principles. In contrast, the ICE theory posits that recognition of a past episode involves judgment processes based on global activation of the item, the context, and the ensemble information in the probe and memory. Experiments 1 and 2 manipulated odor contexts, and Experiment 3 manipulated background-music context. In the three experiments, a total of 384 undergraduates intentionally studied a list of unrelated words. After a filled 5-min retention interval, participants received a recognition test on paper. In the same-context (SC) condition, the same odor or musical piece was presented during both study and test, whereas in the different-context (DC) condition, different odors or musical pieces were presented at study and test. Context-dependent recognition discrimination was found when the hit rate in the DC condition was low but not when it was high. Furthermore, context-dependent recognition discrimination was found when there was a positive context-dependent effect for the hit rate and a negative effect for the false alarm rate, which is a context-based mirror effect. Failure to find context-dependent recognition discrimination occurred when there was no effect for either the hit rate or the false alarm rate. The least-squares regression lines relating the effect sizes of d′ for the DC hit rate, for the odor and background-music contexts, along with previous data of place context, showed that the effect sizes were inversely proportional to the DC hit rate. The present results are best explained by the outshining account, but not by the ICE theory.