Does the Effect of Production Influence Memory for Background Context?

The current study examined whether the benefit of mixed-list production could extend to memory for background contexts using word-background context pairs. Participants studied words presented on background images; words were read aloud or silently. In Experiment 1a, half of the studied items were tested on their studied background image and half were tested on a new image using old-new recognition. Although a production effect in word recognition was observed, context reinstatement had no effect on sensitivity and only a marginal effect on hit rates; it did not interact with production. In Experiment 1b, whether participants encoded the backgrounds and whether that encoding was affected by production was tested using separate recognition tests. A production effect was found in word recognition, but there was no effect in image recognition. Experiment 2 used a cued-recall test, with the studied background images as the cues to directly test whether associations were formed between words and backgrounds at study. A production effect was found but did not interact with the presence of cues during recall. Both the benefit of production and the benefit of context reinstatement appear to be independent of one another, with production not aiding memory for the associations between items nor the context.