Impact
Context effects can have a wide range of impacts in daily life. In reading difficult handwriting context effects are used to determine what letters make up a word. This helps us analyze potentially ambiguous messages and decipher them correctly. It can also affect our perception of unknown sounds based on the noise in the environment. For example, we may fill in a word we cannot make out in a sentence based on the other words we could understand. Context can prime our attitudes and beliefs about certain topics based on current environmental factors and our previous experiences with them.
Context effects can be nullified if we are made consciously aware of the outside stimulus or past history that may influence our decision. For example, a study conducted by Norbet Schwaz and Gerald Clore showed that when asked to rate their overall life satisfaction on either sunny or rainy days, people expressed greater satisfaction on sunny days and less satisfaction on rainy days. However, when people were reminded of the weather their satisfaction rating returned to an almost even distribution. This study demonstrates the effect the environment can have on perception, and that when pointed out, context effects can be nullified.
Context effects also affect memory. We are often better able to recall information in the location in which we learned it or studied it. For example, while studying for a test it is better to study in the environment that the test will be taken in (i.e. classroom) than in a location where the information was not learned and will not need to be recalled. This phenomenon is called transfer-appropriate processing.
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Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn’t be here. It’d still be waiting for an environmental impact statement.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)