Context-dependent memory effects in two immersive virtual reality environments: On Mars and underwater
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BRIEF REPORT
Context-dependent memory effects in two immersive virtual reality environments: On Mars and underwater Yeon Soon Shin 1
&
Rolando Masís-Obando 1 & Neggin Keshavarzian 1 & Riya Dáve 1 & Kenneth A. Norman 1,2
Accepted: 13 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The context-dependent memory effect, in which memory for an item is better when the retrieval context matches the original learning context, has proved to be difficult to reproduce in a laboratory setting. In an effort to identify a set of features that generate a robust context-dependent memory effect, we developed a paradigm in virtual reality using two semantically distinct virtual contexts: underwater and Mars environments, each with a separate body of knowledge (schema) associated with it. We show that items are better recalled when retrieved in the same context as the study context; we also show that the size of the effect is larger for items deemed context-relevant at encoding, suggesting that context-dependent memory effects may depend on items being integrated into an active schema. Keywords Context-dependent memory effect
Introduction Returning to an alma mater for a reunion can bring back memories from the past. Walking by campus may make it easier to recall past events that took place in the dorms, classrooms, and dining halls, even when those memories are not easily retrievable elsewhere. This flood of memories when returning to an old environment is known as the environmental reinstatement effect (Smith, 1979). Research in episodic memory explains this effect with the encoding-specificity hypothesis, which posits that increasing levels of overlap with the encoding context during retrieval aids memory performance (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). However, the beneficial effect of context reinstatement in recall has not been consistently supported in the memory literature (for a review, see Smith & Vela, 2001). Contexts have been manipulated in various ways such as background colors (Isarida & Isarida, 2007; Weiss & Margolius, 1954) and physical rooms (Eich, 1985; Fernandez & Glenberg, 1985), but these manipulations do not always lead to a context-reinstatement effect Yeon Soon Shin and Rolando Masís-Obando are co-first authors * Kenneth A. Norman [email protected] 1
Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton, NJ, USA
2
Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
(Fernandez & Glenberg, 1985; Isarida & Isarida, 2007; Wälti et al., 2019). The discrepancy between the strong anecdotal psychological experience and weak experimental evidence indicates that extant experimental paradigms are missing key features that are responsible for evoking context-dependent memory in real life. What, then, are these missing features? One of the seminal studies that showed strong contextdependency used rich, real-world environments to manipulate the congruency between encoding and retrieval contexts (Godden & Baddeley, 1975). They found that scuba divers recalled learned words better when the retrieval context (underwater
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