The effects of episodic context on memory integration.

Abstract

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.