Herz R S
Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Mem Cognit. 1997 May;25(3):375-80. doi: 10.3758/bf03211293.
The distinctiveness of an ambient odor was examined in relation to its success as a cue in context-dependent memory. Distinctiveness was examined in terms of both cue novelty and contextual appropriateness. Two experiments were conducted in which three different ambient odors that varied in familiarity and contextual appropriateness were manipulated at an incidental word learning encoding session and at a free recall retrieval session 48 h later. Experiment 1 revealed that when a novel ambient odor (osmanthus) was the available context cue, word recall was better than in any other condition. Further, among familiar odor cues, recall was better with a contextually inappropriate odor (peppermint) than with a contextually appropriate odor (clean fresh pine). Experiment 2 confirmed that superior word recall with osmanthus and peppermint depended on the odor cue's being available at both encoding and retrieval, and that the relation of an odor to the situational context is a key factor for predicting its effectiveness as a retrieval cue.
研究了环境气味的独特性与其作为情境依赖记忆线索的成功程度之间的关系。从线索新颖性和情境适宜性两方面对独特性进行了考察。进行了两项实验，在一个附带的单词学习编码环节中操控三种在熟悉度和情境适宜性上有所不同的环境气味，并在48小时后的自由回忆检索环节再次进行操控。实验1表明，当一种新颖的环境气味（桂花）作为可用的情境线索时，单词回忆比其他任何条件下都要好。此外，在熟悉的气味线索中，与情境适宜的气味（清新的松木）相比，情境不适宜的气味（薄荷）能带来更好的回忆效果。实验2证实，桂花和薄荷带来的更好的单词回忆取决于气味线索在编码和检索时都可用，并且气味与情境的关系是预测其作为检索线索有效性的关键因素。
