IMPROVING MEMORY FOR PROSE : THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEPTH OF PROCESSING AND CONTEXT Diane Lemonnier

Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated, the amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of the passages were manipulated to induce different levels of processing and affect amount of information retained. In order to influence the interpretation of the ambiguous paragraphs, different contexts, in the form of biasing titles, accompanied the text. Recall and recognition measures indicated that students remembered more information and more context-consonant information when given instructions which required processing the paragraphs at a semantic level. Thus, context was a powerful determiner of which meaning was remembered from polysemous paragraphs only when incoming information was processed at a deeper, more semantic level.