How does our environment impact what we will later remember? Early work in real-world environments suggested that a matching encoding / retrieval context improves memory. However, some laboratory-based studies have not replicated this advantageous context-dependent memory effect. Using virtual reality methods, we find support for context-dependent memory effects: participants remembered more when placed in the same context as during encoding. This advantage has a tradeoff of falsely ‘recognizing’ similar lures, however. In addition, we find that schema-consistency in terms of the object-environment relationship is beneficial for memory recall, but schema-inconsistency helps recognition. Lastly, we find that differences in the presence (or absence) of dynamic background components differentially elicit the benefits of context-dependent memory. These findings not only add to our understanding of when and how context affects our memory, but they also present an exciting and more naturalistic approach to studying such effects.

We provide new evidence concerning two views of episodic associations: The independent associations hypothesis (IAH)posits that associations are unidirectional and separately modifiable links (AB; AB); the associative symmetry hypothesis(ASH) considers the association to be a holistic conjunction of A and B representations. While existing literature focuseson tests that compare the correlation of forward and backward associations and favors ASH over IAH, we provide thefirst direct evidence of IAH by showing that forward and backward associations are separately modifiable for semanti-cally related pairs. In two experiments, participants studied 30 semantically unrelated and 30 semantically related pairsintermixed in a single list, and then performed a series of up to eight cued-recall test cycles. All pairs were tested in eachcycle, and the testing direction (A-? or B-?) alternated between cycles. Consistent with prior research, unrelated pairsexhibited associative symmetry accuracy and response times improved gradually on each test, suggesting that testing inboth directions strengthened the same association. In contrast, semantically related pairs exhibited a stair-like pattern,where performance did not change from odd to even tests when the test direction changed; it only improved between testsof the same direction. We conclude that episodic associations can have either a holistic representation (ASH) or separatedirectional representations (IAH), depending on the semantic relatedness of their constituent items.

Many everyday decisions are based not only on memories ofdirect experiences, but on memories that are integrated acrossmultiple distinct experiences. Sometimes memory integrationbetween existing memories and newly learnt informationoccurs rapidly, without requiring inference during thedecision. It is known that prior knowledge (i.e. schema)affects the initial acquisition, and consolidation, of memories.In this study, we explore the effect of schema on theintegration of acquired memories between paired associates(e.g. integrating A-B and B-C into A-B-C) that were schemaconsistent or inconsistent, as confirmed with a latent semanticanalysis of text corpora. We find that enabling fast learning,by using material that is consistent with a schema, allows forfast memory integration. These behavioral results areconsistent with predictions generated from neuroscientifichypotheses suggesting that an existing schema might enableneocortical learning that is distinct from a more explicithippocampus-mediated integration of new information.