Stimulus attributes of reactivated memory: alleviation of ontogenetic forgetting in rats is context specific.

Numerous studies have shown that ontogenetic forgetting (infantile amensia) can be alleviated by a number of different types of reminder treatment. The present study extends the information about the alleviation of infantile amnesia by examining the "content" of the reactivated memory. Toward this purpose, one attribute of memory (environmental context) was examined in rats tested either shortly after training (preamnesic) or after 1-week retention interval. For the latter, a reactivation treatment was used to reverse infantile amnesia. At both intervals, a context shift resulted in impaired performance of a conditioned fear response. These findings demonstrate that environment context is an important component of the originally encoded memory as well as the reactivated amnestic memory. The implications of these results for both the reactivation of memory and general memory processes are discussed.