Effects of Environmental Context on Human Memory

Returning to a place after many years of absence can bring memories to mind that may have seemed to be long-lost. Remembering experiences often begins with remembering where we were when the events occurred. How do the environmental contexts of experiences affect what we learn and remember? And how can an understanding of environmental context-dependent memory be used to benefit people? An environment refers to one’s physical surroundings, such as the immediately perceptible and navigable space in which one is immersed. Whereas no individual object or stimulus should be considered an environment, they are nonetheless parts of environments, and collections of objects and stimuli can make up important elements of environments. The environment in which one’s experiences occur, or more precisely, one’s mental representation of that environment is an environmental context, a representation of a place that can be instantiated by an environment that is physically present, one that is remembered, one that is cued or suggested by various stimuli (such as a photo, a video, or a virtual reality device), or an environment that is imagined. Environmental contexts have been defined operationally in many ways by various researchers, but central to the research that will be considered here are the effects of places in which experiences occur. Although stimuli such as color, type font, mood state, and associated words can be elements of episodic contexts, they are not places where experiences occur, nor do they reliably trigger mental representations of places the way that pictures or movies do. This discussion will focus on places or environments associated with events, and their effects on learning and memory. The present chapter will review a long history of investigations of effects of environmental contexts on memory, examining a variety of operational definitions of environmental contexts. Theoretical treatments of contextual influences on memory will be discussed, and some applied uses of context cues will be described, primarily in terms of education, aging, clinical applications, and eyewitness memory. Finally, some as-yet-unanswered questions about environmental context and memory will be discussed.