| Popis: |
Life is filled with changes. Seemingly real news is later proven to be fake; routes to work are altered by construction. Such changes highlight the importance of updating existing memories when encoding new competing information. People can do this by differentiating the change from or integrating the change with existing memories. This process is known as episodic memory updating. Although there is still debate about the underlying mechanisms of memory updating, one consistent theme is that the reinstatement of contextual information that is associated with memories (e.g., times, places, and emotions) plays a key role. Two competing theories exist that lead to distinct predictions about how context reinstatement should affect updating. Interference theory predicts that differentiating contexts associated with the encoding of similar events prevents interference between existing memories and new information, thus promoting updating (for a review, see Smith & Vela, 2001). Conversely, integration theory posits that updating occurs when context reinstatement cues the retrieval of existing memories via a reminding process, thus enabling the integration of existing memories and new related information (for a review, see Wahlheim et al., 2021). Past work has informed our hypotheses by providing evidence for memory integration during context-induced updating (Cox et al., 2021). Although there is support for both accounts, no studies have directly measured how context reinstatement promotes remindings of past events and the consequences of such remindings for subsequent memory. The present experiment will address this issue by examining the extent to which reinstating context for similar events triggers remindings during new learning. More specifically, we will vary the repetition of the background context (i.e., scene picture) associated with word pairs that include shared cues and changed responses (A-B, A-D). This will determine if remindings of A-B memories during A-D learning that are promoted by repeating as opposed to changing A-B contexts will lead to interference (differentiation prediction) or facilitation (integration prediction). |
