Abstract
We designed a novel experiment to investigate the modulation of human recognition memory by environmental context. Human participants were asked to navigate through a four-arm Virtual Reality (VR) maze in order to find and memorize discrete items presented at specific locations in the environment. They were later on tested on their ability to recognize items as previously presented or new. By manipulating the spatial position of half of the studied items during the testing phase of our experiment, we could assess differences in performance related to the congruency of environmental information at encoding and retrieval. Our results revealed that spatial context had a significant effect on the quality of memory. In particular, we found that recognition performance was significantly better in trials in which contextual information was congruent as opposed to those in which it was different. Our results are in line with previous studies that have reported spatial-context effects in recognition memory, further characterizing their magnitude under ecologically valid experimental conditions.
Highlights
The study of the dependence of human memory on environmental context has been conducted under highly constrained laboratory conditions
We first aimed to evaluate if our Virtual Reality (VR) based recognition test could capture the dynamics of recognition memory previously identified in traditional laboratory setups (Squire et al, 2007; Wixted, 2007)
According to the encoding specificity principle (Tulving and Thomson, 1973), human memory is improved when information available at encoding is available at retrieval
Summary
The study of the dependence of human memory on environmental context has been conducted under highly constrained laboratory conditions. Investigations have assessed the role of context by manipulating the congruency of discrete information associated to items during learning and testing. Studies with a broader definition of context have explored the role of space in recognition memory, by assessing how the congruency of the environments of encoding and retrieval affects performance in recognition tests. In such paradigms, subjects are typically presented with items to be learned in one environment, and later on tested on their ability to recognize items in the same or a different environment. Consistent spatial-context effects in recognition memory have been reported in the last decades (for a review and meta analysis, see Smith and Vela, 2001)
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