Psychology, 2017, 8, 463-476 http://www.scirp.org/journal/psych ISSN Online: 2152-7199 ISSN Print: 2152-7180 DOI: 10.4236/psych.2017.83029 February 27, 2017 Encoding Factors Affecting Context Effects on Memory: Congruency, Attention and Exposure Time Shiri Schonbach-Medina, Eli Vakil * Department of Psychology, Leslie and Susan Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel Abstract The aim of the current study was to examine the effects of three factors on the emergence of context effects (CEs). The basic assumption was that the way Target and Context words are initially encoded affects their impact on recog- nition CE. The strength of the memory depends on many factors, including the amount of attention allocated to target and context stimuli when memo- rizing the information and whether the participants were distracted. The in- teraction and relationships between these different factors were examined in the present study. First is Congruency between target and context words in terms of the gender of the nouns presented. Second is Attention allocated to the stimuli, whether equal attention so that both are considered targets (T-T) or differential attention allocation so that one is the target and the other is context (T-C). Third is Exposure time of 300 vs. 3000 msec. We hypothesized that CE would be stronger under the T-T vs. T-C attention condition, con- gruent vs. incongruent learning conditions and short vs. long exposure time. One-hundred and fifteen individuals participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to one of the two Exposure time conditions. Half of the word-pairs were congruent and half were incongruent. Short exposure time in the Congruent T-T condition was associated with CE in terms of hit rates, but not false alarms, with no CE in the incongruent pairs. As predicted, lengthen- ing exposure time reduced CE in terms of hit rates, and congruent relations were associated with greater CE in terms of false alarms, with no influence of encoding type. Keywords Context Effect, Recognition, Congruency Effect, Exposure Time, Attention How to cite this paper: Schonbach-Medina, S., & Vakil, E. (2017). Encoding Factors Af- fecting Context Effects on Memory: Con- gruency, Attention and Exposure Time. Psy- chology, 8, 463-476. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2017.83029 Received: December 9, 2016 Accepted: February 24, 2017 Published: February 27, 2017 Copyright © 2017 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access