Their unusual experiment showed that learning lists of words either underwater or on dry land would lead to better recall performance when the retrieval process was performed in the same natural environment compared to a change in context. Encouraged by positive findings in other species, experiments on human subjects were conducted but early studies struggled to transfer the effect of context-dependent memory to human behavior until Godden and Baddeley demonstrated context-dependency of human recall performance in a seminal study. contextual fear conditioning: ) and generally confirmed the influence of context reinstatement on behavior. illumination:, odors: ) and memory domains (e.g. Subsequent research extended this finding to other contextual manipulations (e.g. The influence of contextual changes on behavior was first demonstrated by Watson who was able to disrupt spatial memory performance in rodents by altering the orientation of the maze between learning and retention. This kind of memory reactivation spawned by environmental cues is called context-dependent memory, a phenomenon that has been studied in memory research for many decades (for a review: ). In his famous Madeleine Episode, Proust describes a sensation that the taste of a sweet tart arouses an incredibly vivid remembering of the past, awakening memories that have not come to mind for a long time. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The datasets generated and analyzed in the current study, are available at Open Science Framework ( ).įunding: This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF grant 320030_175616) to NW. Received: NovemAccepted: MaPublished: March 29, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Wälti et al. #Context dependent memory free#Moreover, a Bayesian sequential statistical analysis revealed moderate to strong evidence against the hypothesis that reinstatement of visual contexts benefits free recall memory tasks indicating that effects are small and may not be suitable for transfer into everyday learning.Ĭitation: Wälti MJ, Woolley DG, Wenderoth N (2019) Reinstating verbal memories with virtual contexts: Myth or reality? PLoS ONE 14(3):Įditor: Evan James Livesey, University of Sydney, AUSTRALIA We also investigated contextual modulation of oscillatory brain activity in order to test the effect of reinstated neural contexts, which failed to evoke a robust effect when re-tested in an internal conceptual replication study. We show convincingly that even rich, salient and fully surrounding visual contexts provided by virtual reality are not sufficient to induce effects of context-dependency in a free recall memory task. Data from 120 participants were included in three studies comprising a variety of visual cues. Here we report the results of a multi-study design investigating the influence of reinstated visual contexts on memory performance. Based on this, the widely held belief is that context-dependent memory is a strong and robust effect, with transferable substance for everyday learning and potential clinical applications. This context-dependent memory effect has been investigated over the course of several decades and has been demonstrated with many different types of contexts. Later, these strings of extra information can help retrieve the learned content as demonstrated by experiments where contextual cues from an encoding situation facilitate remembering and improve memory performance when reinstated during retrieval. When learning new information, contextual information about the encoding situation is stored in addition to the focal memory content.
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