Liu Zhenghao, Johansson Mikael, Johansson Roger, Bramão Inês
Department of Psychology, Lund University, BOX 213, 221 00, Lund, Sweden.
Sci Rep. 2024 Dec 4;14(1):30159. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-82004-7.
Information encountered in different events, such as people and objects, can be interlinked in memory. Such memory integration supports novel inferences about the world. This study investigates the role of episodic context on memory integration in two experiments using an associative inference task. Participants encoded events with overlapping (AB and BC) and non-overlapping associations (XY) presented in the same or different episodic contexts. Inference performance across events (AC) was tested in the absence (Experiment 1) and in the presence (Experiment 2) of the encoding context. Our data show that inferences across events encoded in the same context were more accurate, faster, and made with greater confidence compared to those encoded in different contexts. However, this effect was observed only when the context was presented during testing, suggesting that context enhances associative inferences by facilitating retrieval of events associated with that context. These findings demonstrate that revisiting the encoding context promotes memory integration by providing privileged access to contextually associated memory traces and facilitating their flexible recombination to form novel inferences.
在不同事件中遇到的信息，比如人和物体，在记忆中可以相互关联。这种记忆整合支持对世界的新颖推理。本研究在两个实验中使用联想推理任务来探究情景背景对记忆整合的作用。参与者对在相同或不同情景背景中呈现的具有重叠关联（AB和BC）和非重叠关联（XY）的事件进行编码。在编码背景不存在（实验1）和存在（实验2）的情况下测试跨事件（AC）的推理表现。我们的数据表明，与在不同背景中编码的事件相比，在相同背景中编码的事件的推理更准确、更快，且信心更强。然而，只有当背景在测试期间呈现时才观察到这种效应，这表明背景通过促进与该背景相关事件的检索来增强联想推理。这些发现表明，重温编码背景通过提供对与背景相关的记忆痕迹的特权访问，并促进它们的灵活重组以形成新颖推理，从而促进记忆整合。
