This phenomenon isn’t limited to physical locations. On land, their recall was best for the words they had learned on land, whereas underwater they were better at remembering the word lists they learned underwater. The happiest days of your life, right? Giedre Vaitekuna/ShutterstockĬontext-dependent memory was confirmed by an ingenious 1975 experiment in which divers memorised lists of words and were then tested both on land and underwater. This is why those old memories come flooding back when you step into your childhood bedroom or walk past your old school. If you can change your context to resemble those from seemingly long-forgotten memories, you should be able to remember them. This explains why it’s harder to remember older events.īut, of course, older memories aren’t permanently forgotten. Because your mental context is always changing, your mental context will be most similar to recently experienced memories. According to the theory, you’re most likely to remember memories from contexts that are similar to the context you’re in now. These mechanisms are simple, but the implications are profound. In any given situation, your brain is rapidly rifling through your memories for ones that most closely resemble your current state of context. During memory search, your current mental context is your set of search terms. Your brain’s memory search process is rather like a Google search, in that you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for if your search terms closely match the source content. This similarity between contexts is important when it comes to retrieving memories. However, some context states will be similar to each other – perhaps because they share the same location, or mood, or have some other factor in common.
Even as you read this page, changes in your thoughts and mental activity are causing your mental context to change.Īs a consequence, each memory is associated with different states of context. What is context? It’s not just your physical location – it’s a mental state that also comprises the thoughts, emotions, and other mental activity you’re experiencing at a given moment. Contextual-binding theory goes a step further: A and B are associated not just with one other, but also with the context in which they occurred. If A and B occur together, they become associated.
It is well established that learning in the brain happens by a process of association.
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