Department of Psychology, New York University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2013 Nov;142(4):1277-86. doi: 10.1037/a0034024. Epub 2013 Aug 19.
Episodic memory allows people to reexperience the past by recovering the sequences of events that characterize those prior experiences. Although experience is continuous, people are able to selectively retrieve and reexperience more discrete episodes from their past, raising the possibility that some elements become tightly related to each other in memory, whereas others do not. The current series of experiments was designed to ask how shifts in context during an experience influence how people remember the past. Specifically, we asked how context shifts influence the ability to remember the relative order of past events, a hallmark of episodic memory. We found that memory for the order of events was enhanced within, rather than across, context shifts, or boundaries (Experiment 1). Next, we showed that this relative enhancement in order memory was eliminated when across-item associative processing was disrupted (Experiment 2), suggesting that context shifts have a selective effect on sequential binding. Finally, we provide evidence that the act of making order memory judgments involves the reactivation of representations that bridged the tested items (Experiment 3). Together, these data suggest that boundaries may serve to parse continuous experience into sequences of contextually related events and that this organization facilitates remembering the temporal order of events that share the same context.
情景记忆使人们能够通过恢复那些先前经历的特征事件序列来重新体验过去。尽管经验是连续的，但人们能够有选择地检索和重新体验过去更离散的事件，这使得一些元素在记忆中彼此紧密相关，而另一些则不然。本系列实验旨在探讨经验过程中的情境变化如何影响人们对过去的记忆。具体来说，我们想知道情境变化如何影响人们记住过去事件相对顺序的能力，这是情景记忆的一个标志。我们发现，事件的顺序记忆在情境变化（或边界）内而不是跨情境变化得到增强（实验 1）。接下来，我们表明，当跨项目联想加工受到干扰时，这种顺序记忆的相对增强就会消失（实验 2），这表明情境变化对序列绑定有选择性影响。最后，我们提供的证据表明，做出顺序记忆判断的行为涉及到测试项目之间的代表的重新激活（实验 3）。综上所述，这些数据表明边界可以将连续的经验分割成一系列具有上下文关联的事件，并且这种组织有助于记住具有相同上下文的事件的时间顺序。
