ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Episodic memory enhancement versus impairment is determined by contextual similarity across events.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ecological assessment of transdiagnostic clinical symptoms in serious mental illness with daily smartphone surveys.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- A role for context-cued study-phase retrievals in episodic memory updating.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Ecological Assessment of Transdiagnostic Clinical Symptoms in Serious Mental Illness with Daily Smartphone Surveys.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Contextual Influence on Pattern Separation During Encoding.NeuroSci · 2025Article
- Semantic relatedness proactively benefits learning, memory, and interdependence across episodes.eLife · 2024Article
- The effects of episodic context on memory integration.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Context reexposure to bolster contextual dependency of emotional episodic memory.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neural similarity between overlapping events at learning differentially affects reinstatement across the cortex.NeuroImage · 2023Article
- Interpolated retrieval retroactively increases recall and promotes cross-episode memory interdependence.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Encoding contexts are incidentally reinstated during competitive retrieval and track the temporal dynamics of memory interference.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Healthy Middle-Aged Adults Have Preserved Mnemonic Discrimination and Integration, While Showing No Detectable Memory Benefits.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
For over a century, stability of spatial context across related episodes has been considered a source of memory interference, impairing memory retrieval. However, contemporary memory integration theory generates a diametrically opposite prediction. Here, we aimed to resolve this discrepancy by manipulating local context similarity across temporally disparate but related episodes and testing the direction and underlying mechanisms of memory change. A series of experiments show that contextual stability produces memory integration and marked reciprocal strengthening. Variable context, conversely, seemed to result in competition such that new memories become enhanced at the expense of original memories. Interestingly, these patterns were virtually inverted in an additional experiment where context was reinstated during recall. These observations 1) identify contextual similarity across original and new memories as an important determinant in the volatility of memory, 2) present a challenge to classic and modern theories on episodic memory change, and 3) indicate that the sensitivity of context-induced memory changes to retrieval conditions may reconcile paradoxical predictions of interference and integration theory.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.