| Abstract: | The present study investigated the effects of the new context reinstatement procedure on recognition memory for faces. All faces were portrayed in distinctive background contexts which were pretested to induce a negative emotion, a positive emotion or no emotion at all. These contexts were, at test, either the same (e.g. the same concentration camp), changed (e.g. concentration camp→road accident) or changed but of the same type (e.g. ‘semantic context’: two different concentration camps). Results provided evidence of considerable improvement of recognition performance with semantic context. Moreover, a context inducing a negative emotion was shown to impair face recognition, but semantic context was found to counteract such an impairment. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of their relevance for theories of recognition memory and practical contributions to eyewitness identification. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
