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Normally, retention of an avoidance response by a rat is impaired when the test context is novel or does not correspond to the training context. Experiment 1 demonstrates that such an impairment of test performance can be alleviated if a rat receives a cuing treatment or reminder of training in the novel test context prior to testing. Experiment 2 indicates that when rats receive avoidance training in one context and then receive a reminder of training in a novel context, they perform more poorly when tested in the training context than do animals that receive no reminder. This finding is discussed in relation to current theories of contextual influence over retention performance.It is clear that contextual stimuli exert strong control over the retention performance of animals. In general, when an animal learns to perform a response in a given context, retention performance is best when subsequent testing occurs in that same context. Deficits in test performance usually result when training and test contexts differ (see Spear, 1978).Efforts to explain the effects of context on retention range from notions that contextual stimuli function as conditioned or discriminative stimuli (e.g., Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) to the idea that contextual stimuli serve as retrieval cues for the memory of training experience (e.g., Medin, 1975;Spear, 1973). Regardless of the specific hypothesis advanced, however, virtually all explanations of contextual effects share a common assumption. It is generally assumed that in order for contextual stimuli to gain control over retention performance, these stimuli must be present at the time a response is acquired.Although such an assumption seems reasonable, recent evidence from our laboratory suggests that it may not always be valid (see Gordon, 1983). These results indicate that contextual stimuli not available at the time of learning, but present when an animal receives a cuing treatment or "reminder" of prior learning, can affect subsequent retention performance substantially. In these studies, the cuing treatments or "reminders" involved confronting animals with a subset of the stimuli that had been present at . the time of learning, without exposing the animals to a complete relearning trial. The rationale for such treatments was to provide enough cues to induce retrieval of the training memory without allowing an

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