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Episodic or context dependent memory is often studied as a function of the context cues in immediate retrieval of target information. Little research has been done on how the relationship of context cues to target retrieval changes over time, and none with older adult subjects. The current research investigated how the influence of context on accuracy of memory changes over time, and age-related differences in those influences. Using immediate, 2- and 7- day retention intervals, our results indicate that, while context initially supports the retrieval of information, assistance is temporary and fades before the memory for the target information. These changes in context effects were not different for younger and older adult groups.

A meta-analysis of the contextual interference effect produced 139 estimates of effect sizes from 61 studies. The average overall effect size was .38. The effect size for basic research (.57) was significantly different from applied research (.19). Significant differences were also obtained between the effect sizes for adults (.50) and those for younger learners (.10). Power for retention and transfer scores was not significantly different. The overall mean power of the studies reviewed was .43.

Duration of practice trial on a pursuit rotor task in contextual interference was investigated. Participants practiced at each of 4 angular velocities, with 24 participants completing 28 trials lasting 20 sec., and 24 participants completing 112 trials of 5 sec. Half of the participants in each trial-duration condition practiced in a blocked format and half practiced in a random format. After random practice posttest performance was better than blocked practice when practice-trial duration was 20 sec., but worse when practice-trial duration was 5 sec. This result is not consistent with theoretical explanations of the contextual interference effect and is discussed with reference to the task characteristics and demands of the pursuit rotor.

This study is a replication of the experiment by Lange, Houran, Harte, and Havens (1996) on contextual variables, in which hallucinations appear to be affected by the environmental context. These contextual variables are influential in the reporting of haunting and poltergeist-like episodes. This study extended the previous study by adding new factors of time of day, climactic conditions, and emotional feelings. These were analyzed for a different sample, looking for further congruency between experiential content and the context. The sample (N=843) were reports found on the Internet and in one book. The Lange, et al. study was replicated in that contextual variables were identified in 99.2% of the reports, the content of the reports was judged to be consistent with the nature of the contextual variables in 58.8% of the reports, and contextual variables were related to the percipients' state of arousal and the modalities of experience.

In the present experiment, we investigated the extent to which the presentation context influenced the perception of the causal relatedness of sentence pairs. 60 participants were randomly assigned to one of two presentation conditions. Participants in the Blocked condition received sets of sentence pairs, with each set consisting of four possible causes for a given outcome. Participants in the Distributed condition received sets consisting of four unrelated outcomes each paired with a sentence describing a possible cause. Presentation condition had essentially no effect on the perception of causal relatedness.

This study was designed to examine the effect of three practice models (repetitions, random, and combined) on the acquisition and retention of fundamental motor skills. 54 girls in Grade 4 were randomly assigned to the three different practice groups who practiced three skills of ball rolling, racket striking, and ball kicking. All subjects received pretests, posttests, and a 3-wk. retention test. Performance was significantly improved during practice in the three groups for the three skills. The repetitions group performed better than the other two groups at the end of practice. The contextual interference effect in retention was only shown for the racket-striking skill, in which the random group was significantly better than the repetitions and the combined groups. An attempt was made to attribute that specific result to the special characteristics of the striking skill in this study as an open skill with which subjects had a previous experience.

This study investigated the effects of figure context on the apparent length of a line. In Exp. 1, ten participants were asked to adjust the length of a comparison line to match a standard line enclosed within a rectangle. The participants consistently overestimated the length of the standard line, demonstrating the stretching effect of figure context on the apparent length of a line. In Exp. 2 (12 participants), the size of the context figure was varied and it had no significant influence on the magnitude of the context effect. In Exp. 3 (nine participants), the context effect was shown not only for squares and rectangles but also for other shapes of figures such as circles and 5-pointed stars. We discuss the possible mechanism of the figure-context effect within Gregory's (1970, 1978) misapplied constancy theory of visual illusions.

24 7-yr.-old children and 24 university-age adults practiced a ballistic aiming task under either low contextual interference (blocked practice) or high contextual interference (random practice). All subjects performed 90 acquisition trials, followed by 20 transfer trials and 15 retention trials. Similar to previous findings, the adults performed the acquisition trials better under blocked than under random conditions, yet performed the retention and transfer tests better after random than blocked practice. No differences in acquisition were found between blocked and random practice conditions for the children; nevertheless, the random group performed the retention and transfer tests better than the blocked group. The results are discussed in relation to applied and theoretical issues of contextual interference.

The magnitude of the Ebbinghaus illusion has been reported to be greater when test element and context elements are figurally similar as opposed to figurally dissimilar. In the current investigation with 16 observers, illusion magnitude was greater for a figurally similar configuration even though the context elements of the figurally similar configuration were perceived as smaller than the context elements of a figurally dissimilar configuration. Hence, figural similarity appears to have a pre-potent effect in the Ebbinghaus illusion.

This study was designed to examine the contextual interference effect on teaching golf skills in a naturalistic setting to 2 groups of 18 novice golfers who as undergraduate students practiced four foundational skills under conditions of low and high contextual interference, respectively. A t test for independent samples indicated no significant differences between groups. Findings are discussed and recommendations for research are made.

This experiment was designed to investigate varying conditions of contextual interference within two different conditions of movement tasks during acquisition on the acquisition and retention of a computerized task and transfer to a functional skill. Performance of head movements was conducted under open- or closed-task conditions and with random or blocked schedules of practice. Analysis indicated that learning under the open-task condition resulted in better retention and transfer than the closed-task condition. It is suggested that increasing the within-trial variability in the open-task condition produced a contextual interference effect. In this regard, support for Battig's predictions is provided by the current findings in that the high variability present during the open-task condition was more beneficial for retention and transfer than the low variability present during the closed-task condition. Differences between random and blocked schedules of practice on the retention and transfer data were not statistically significant.

Many studies have shown that practicing several motor tasks in a random (high contextual interference) order promotes motor learning relative to practicing the same tasks in a blocked order (low contextual interference). The facilitative effect of high contextual interference has been attributed to more frequent intertask comparisons, greater difficulty in recalling task solutions between trials, and the dissimilarity among the various tasks. Each of these explanations suggests that task difficulty is increased by high contextual interference. The hypothesis of this study was that this increase in task difficulty during practice would be associated with a higher attention load during practice. This hypothesis was supported; however, high contextual interference promoted only a transient increase in retention. The short-lived effect was attributed to the continuous nature of the task and was discussed in terms of the necessary conditions for contextual interference to emerge.

92 young adolescents were tested using Tversky and Kahneman's (1981) decision problems for framing effects. A notable number of young adolescents tested were not influenced by the context of the decision problems, thus they selected the same response option for positively and negatively framed problems. Parallel information was not available in Tversky and Kahneman's study for adults because they used a between-subjects design. However, for present adolescents who selected different response options for different framing problems, the response pattern exhibited by them resembled the general pattern exhibited by the adults tested in Tversky and Kahneman's study - negative frames led them to accept risk to avoid certain loss; positive frames prevented them from risking what they were certain to gain. Boys and girls were similar in their susceptibility to framing effects as were honors students in mathematics as compared to nonhonors students. Although the positive vs negative framing only influenced some of the young adolescents tested in this study, because the influence was consistent, researchers and educators interested in adolescents' decisions involving risky choices might use framing principles to design and assess cognitive interventions for high-risk behaviors among young adolescents.

This investigation examined the contextual interference effect when manipulating over-all force in a golf-putting task. Undergraduate women (N= 30) were randomly assigned to a Random, Blocked-Random, or Blocked practice condition and practiced golf putting from distances of 2.43 m, 3.95 m, and 5.47 m during acquisition. Subjects in the Random condition practiced trials in a quasirandom sequence and those in the Blocked-Random condition practiced trials initially in a blocked sequence with the remainder of the trials practiced in a quasirandom sequence. In the Blocked condition subjects practiced trials in a blocked sequence. A 24-hr. transfer test consisted of 30 trials with 10 trials each from 1.67 m, 3.19 m, and 6.23 m. Transfer scores supported the Magill and Hall (1990) hypothesis that, when task variations involve learning parameters of a generalized motor program, the benefit of random practice over blocked practice would not be found.

The content of perceived apparitions, e.g., bereavement hallucinations, cannot be explained entirely in terms of electromagnetically induced neuro-chemical processes. It was shown that contextual variables influential in hallucinatory and hypnotic states also structured reported haunting experiences. As predicted, high congruency was found between the experiential content and the nature of the contextual variables. Further, the number of contextual variables involved in an experience was related to the type of experience and the state or arousal preceding the experience. Based on these findings we argue that a more complete explanation of haunting experiences should take into account both electromagnetically induced neurochemical processes and factors related to contextual mediation.

To evaluate whether previously observed age differences in long-delay taste aversion were due to age-related differences in the shared association of contextual cues and CS with the US, weanling, young-adult, and old-adult rats were given a NaCl or LiCl US immediately after or a LiCl US 3 hr. after a saccharin CS presentation in a black or white context. They were then given a context-preference test in a chamber which was half black and half white. Analysis showed rats, irrespective of age or conditioning context, spent a significantly smaller percentage of time on the white side than on the black side of the test chamber. These results suggest that age differences in long-delay taste-aversion conditioning are not due to age-related differences in the shared association of contextual cues and CS with the US.

This experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of contextual preexposure on the freezing of rats. 45 albino rats were first placed in an experimental chamber for 5 min. without electric shock (contextual preexposure) for a few days (0, 3, 5, 10, or 15 days). Then they received a shock (1 mA, 2 sec.) for 6 consecutive days. After receiving one shock, the rats which had been contextually preexposed for some days froze more frequently than the rats which had not experienced contextual preexposure. The contextual preexposure facilitated the conditional freezing of rats following one-trial context-shock conditioning; however, there were no differences in freezing between them after receiving more than two shocks. It seems that a few conditioning trials overcame the facilitating effect of contextual preexposure.

This study was undertaken to examine the anchoring effect in judgments of the grammaticality of sentences. Thirty-three students judged the target sentences involving an intermediate level of judged grammaticality. The first group of 11 subjects judged the sentences paired with the sentences involving high grammaticality (high anchor); the second group of 11 judged them when paired with the sentences involving low grammaticality (low anchor); and the third group of 11 judged them without being given anchor sentences. Analysis shows a clear contrast effect such that the subjects given low-anchor sentences judged the target sentences as more grammatical, while those given high-anchor sentences tended to judge them as less grammatical. Implications of the findings were discussed as they were related to Chomsky's contention about a native speaker's intuition regarding judgments of grammatically.

Fifteen speech-language pathologists with extensive experience judging speakers' intelligibility and 15 control subjects with no such previous experience provided magnitude-estimation responses for two sets of nine audiotaped speech samples. These samples were three utterances composed of a group of 17 words that contained all the consonant phonemes of English. These words were arranged to form a set of either meaningful or nonsense utterances. Nine separate versions of both the meaningful and nonsense utterances were created by systematically increasing the number of phonemes produced incorrectly on each of the nine recordings. The analysis indicated no significant difference between the magnitude-estimation scaling responses of experienced and inexperienced listeners. A significant over-all difference was found for listeners' responses to meaningful versus nonsense utterances. The advantages of magnitude-estimation scaling as a measure of speakers' intelligibility are discussed.

When in 1964 stress induced by Restricted Environmenta Stimulation (REST) was publicized, Orne and Scheibe showed 'sensory deprivation' effects could be produced merely by manipulating contextual cues. Since REST is now widely regarded as beneficial, it seemed appropriate to reexamine these early findings. Stringently replicating Orne and Scheibe's procedures, 10 subjects were exposed to conditions designed to generate expected REST effects. Conditions for 10 controls suggested that nothing was expected to happen. Analyses did not confirm earlier findings as no significant difference was found between experimental and control groups on any measure. A postexperimental inquiry identified positive attitudes toward REST. The specific experimental context, demand characteristics, and situational cues did not elicit responses inconsistent with the general sociopsychological context. Researchers are cautioned about attributing causality to contextual cues because context exists merely at a correlative level with data collection.

In an exploratory study, the effects of contextual interference on retention and transfer performance were studied for learning a complex cognitive skill, namely, troubleshooting a computer-based simulation of a chemical process plant. Support was found for the 'transfer paradox': high contextual interference had negative effects on performance during practice and none on number of retention problems solved after the training but positive effects on number of new problems solved (transfer). Implications for the design of training are discussed.

This study investigated the differential effects of cuing in a number of contexts on recall and recognition at various retention intervals. Subjects were shown cue-target word pairs and were asked to recall the target words under three sets of cues, varying in relation to the original cue. All 80 subjects completed a recognition task following the final recall task. Results suggest type of cuing does not have differential effects on recall and recognition; both recall and recognition are hindered by cuing in a number of different contexts, and the ability to recall improves over time, cuing, and exposure to the list.

Previous studies of contextual interference have shown that practicing several motor skills randomly (high contextual interference) facilitates retention and transfer in comparison to practicing the same tasks in a blocked order (low contextual interference). However, many studies have not supported this phenomenon in motor learning, and some researchers have questioned whether the effect can be tested by using only a few trials on the transfer test. The present study used a different methodological approach in which the number of test trials was increased to assess whether the contextual interference effect is sustained over an extended number of trials in the transfer phase. Undergraduate students (N = 32) were randomly allocated to either a blocked or random group. The participants practiced 80 acquisition trials in the dart-throwing task from distances of 300 cm and 420 cm, using two different grips. The transfer test after a 10-min. interval consisted of 40 trials with a new grip at a distance of 360 cm. The results did not support the contextual interference effect since there were no significant differences between groups on transfer. These findings suggest that the contextual interference effect may not be a global learning phenomenon which can be generalized to all learning situations.

Research on psychological differentiation and psychopathology has indicated that both extremes of differentiation are found in clinical populations. Previous research found that subjects with over-ideational or delusional symptomatology are likely to be field-independent. It was predicted that college students with high scores on measures of Perceptual Aberration and Magical Ideation, particularly those also high on Impulsive Nonconformity, would receive higher scores than control subjects on the Group Embedded Figures Test, a measure of differentiation. It was also predicted that subjects receiving high scores on Physical Anhedonia would show lower differentiation than controls. The results did not support these predictions, calling into question the relevance of the field dependence/independence construct to schizotypal symptoms. Findings are also discussed in terms of the possible heterogeneity of the Perceptual Aberration and Magical Ideation groups, restriction of range in samples of nonclinical subjects with schizotypal experiences, and problems in the measurement of cognitive style.

In the present study, interactions of contextual interference and the cognitive style reflection-impulsivity were examined for training and retention performance. 64 subjects were randomly assigned to either a random or blocked practice schedule in learning a cursor-movement task. Reflectivity indices were determined by means of our computerized version of the Matching Familiar Figures Test. Analysis showed that the generally positive effect of practicing under a random practice schedule decreased for more reflective subjects. Further, training under a random practice schedule forced impulsive subjects to behave more like reflective ones, which improved their performance at retention. It was concluded that reflection-impulsivity is an important factor to be incorporated into the design of effective training programs.

Using Tabossi and Johnson-Laird's technique to test whether 8- to 10-yr.-old children with good and poor reading comprehension differ in use of context while they read, those with good reading comprehension is one study and adults in another showed an inhibitory effect for incongruent context, unaccompanied by a facilitative effect of congruent context. The poor comprehenders in Grade 2 showed a facilitative effect of congruent, context-dependent context.

To assess further the effectiveness of bizarre imagery, undergraduates were exposed to a variety of paired-associate, stimulus contexts (unmixed normal, unmixed bizarre, and mixed) and then were tested at one of three retention intervals (0, 3, or 5 days). Consistent with our earlier findings, elements within the mixed context were recalled the best at both the 0- and 3-day intervals. Interestingly, the unmixed bizarre items improved performance as much as mixed ones when testing occurred at 5 days, suggesting that bizarre-only elements needed sufficient time to develop their distinctive memory traces.

Event related potentials (ERP) and reaction times (RT) were recorded during the performance of memory-retrieval tasks using the Japanese kanji characters. P300 latency and RT increased as the memory set-size increased. The slope differences between RT and P300 latency were larger for stimuli when concrete kanji were used than when abstract kanji were used. This suggests that, in memory search, the 20 subjects were likely to employ direct lexical access when processing concrete kanji and likely to use phonetic coding when processing abstract kanji.

40 subjects given equal and random amounts of practice on a variable speed pursuit rotor exhibited no contextual interference effect on the performance of two transfer tasks (35 and 60 rpm) 48 hours later.

This experiment was designed to investigate the varying conditions of contextual interference within three age groups. 40 5-yr.-olds, 40 7-yr.-olds, and 40 11-yr.-olds practiced the task of throwing beanbags under either low contextual interference (blocked practice), high contextual interference (random practice), or medium contextual interference (combined practice). All subjects performed 30 acquisition trial, 12 retention trials and 6 transfer trials. Analysis indicated that only the 7-yr.-old subjects differed in their performance in the various practice groups. As hypothesized and suggested by developmental theories, the combined and blocked practice groups acquired the task better. On the other hand, the 5- and 11-yr.-olds did not differ in performance in the different practice groups. Whether this is associated with difficulty of the task or the length of practice can be assessed in further study. Contextual interference in different age groups needs further investigation.

Assimilation and contrast (context-produced increases and decreases in sensed similarity) in awareness may be basic to understanding vision, audition, cognition, and memory. Key considerations follow.

Context factors were more strongly correlated with job satisfaction than content factors in all stages of tenure for 921 technical and professional employees of a state agency.

Two groups of 12 undergraduates learned a 26-item list of medium-imagery words. Those who visualized an examination-hall scored better at 1-wk. recall than those who visualized countryside during learning, thereby providing confirmation of the context-dependency effect.