An experimental study on context formation
Makiko Naka · The Japanese journal of psychology · 1985
Information (in human thoughts) activated by a series of preceding stimuli was defined in this study as the context for the following stimuli. To investigate the factors that affect context formation and the property of the context, semantically related Japanese words (context words: CW) were presented successively to 152 undergraduates. In Exp. 1, subjects decided if a target word (T) following CW was related to the context. The more the number of CW, and the shorter the presentation time/interval of words, the quicker the responses were. However in Exp. 2, where subjects' task was changed to lexical decision, this effect disappeared, suggesting that the effect could not be explained by the mere facilitation of semantic access of T. In Exp. 3, one group of subjects did the same task as in Exp. 1, while the other decided if the same word as T was in CW. In both groups, the context effect was observed for the related and unrelated Ts but not for the identical T though the performance for the identical T was the best. This suggested that both the integrated and the individual representations of CW were formed by the context.