1 Contextual dependence of the production of study-time effect in free recall

An episodic-memory trace of an event consists of information about both the focal elements and setting of an event (Tulving, 1983). The setting is the psychological background or environment in which the event takes place. The relations or associations between the focal elements and the setting are integral to the episodic memory. As long as the trace is episodic in nature, the setting is always one of the defining features of an event (Tulving, 1983), and it can also provide a source of retrieval cues for the focal elements. Thus, in order to understand the episodic memory entirely, one should deal with both the focal elements and the setting of the episode, and the associations between them. The setting is usually referred to as context. In the present paper, the setting will be referred to as “episodic context”. The episodic context contains multiple elements, such as the time of day and the place of the event, the person(s) with whom the subject spent the duration of the event, and any other situational information. Thus, for the manipulations of the episodic context in the present experiments, the author varied three contextual elements: the rooms in which subjects studied items and received a test; the experimenter who instructed subjects; and interpolated tasks which characterize the situation of the experimental session. This compound manipulation of the context was designed to vary the psychological as well as the physical context. Fernandez and Glenberg (1985) have pointed out that the critical feature of the events occurred within an experimental context would not change with a change of room, eve