Investigates the effect of specificity on retention following nonsemantic processing. Five experiments are reported in which structural specificity was manipulated along with either phonemic or orthographic dimensions, and process specificity was manipulated by variations in the nonsemantic orienting tasks. Data are interpreted in terms of a…

The context effect in recognition memory has been attributed to retrieval failure following a context change. Since this inference is based in part upon the similarity of context effects in recognition and recall, two experiments were conducted to examine further the similarity of context effects upon recognition and recall. (Editor)

If half of the items in a list are repeated over a series of trials while the remainder of the items are new on each trial, recall of the repeated items is impaired. Two experiments examined the list context effect and a list differentiation interpretation was supported. (Editor/RK)