Actions, contexts, memory—what is the relation?

Whole list contexts have been found to influence action memory differently than item‐specific contexts. Usually there is no recall enhancement with item‐specific contexts, but considerable improvement with whole‐list contexts. Three experiments investigated the effect of both kinds of context upon action memory. The results showed that whole‐list contexts gave the beneficial effect, probably through their ability to string together actions within a common frame. Contrary to expectation the effects of item‐specific contexts were not found to differ between motor and nonmotor encoding conditions, irrespective of whether these contexts were self‐generated or provided by the experimenter. The experimental results suggest that the function of item‐specific contexts has more to do with helping item differentiation than relational encoding. Since action events possess a high degree of distinctiveness, there is not much to gain by the addition of item‐specific contexts in action memory tasks.