Effects of cuing in an “irrelevant” context

Abstract

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

Does contextual change determine long-term forgetting?

“…These data appear to be inconsistent with those obtained by Gordon and his colleagues (Gordon et al, 1981;Mowrer & Gordon, 1983;Wittrup & Gordon, 1982), who have repeatedly demonstrated that a particular cuing treatment may overcome the detrimental effect of contextual changes (change of experimental room). Nevertheless, to be effective in Gordon's paradigms, the treatment must include two successive phases: the cuing treatment itself, consisting of the 15-sec placement of the animal in a box that is identical to a part of the training apparatus, followed by a second phase in which the animal is placed, for 3.5 min, in a holding cage in the room where the testing is to be run.…”

Reactivation of an old memory during sleep and wakefulness

“…However, there are many reports in the literature that indicate that cuing procedures result in a retention deficit when a treatment, which has amnestic effects when delivered just after learning, is administered during a cuing episode, even a long time after learning (Devietti & Kirkpatrick, 1976;Judge & Quartermain, 1982). This is also true when the cuing episode occurs in an irrelevant context (Mowrer & Gordon, 1983). From these observations, two proposals can be put forward to account for the present effect of cuing in PS.…”

“…On the other hand, it has been shown (Mowrer & Gordon, 1983) that cuing in a novel context, different from that of training, could result in poorer retention performance than if no cuing had occurred. One interpretation proposed to explain this decrease in performance is that contextual stimuli present at the time of cuing rnight acquire control over responding, thus diminishing the control exerted by…”

“…When reactivated, a trace becomes "malleable" (Gordon, 1983) and can be modified by incorporation of new information present when the trace is reactivated. For example, Mowrer and Gordon (1983) have shown that cue reactivation that takes place in a novel and nonpertinent context (i.e., different from that of acquisition and restitution) impairs retention performance. Obviously, state of vigilance must be an important aspect of the internal context, and internal context provided by PS could be too different from that of wakefulness associated with training.…”

Persistence and plasticity in the human memory system: An empirical investigation of the overwriting hypothesis

“…It could be that experimentally-induced amnesia is not an 'all-or-none' phenomenon and the reminder treatment provides a learning opportunity that summates with a residual memory trace (also see Rescorla & Heth, 1975). Although this may be plausible when a US-only reminder is employed, it is less clear how a CS-only reminder (e.g., Mowrer & Gordon, 1983) or context-only reminder (e.g., Sara, 1973) would work in this way. Indeed, presentation of an unpaired CS is equivalent to an extinction trial, which would normally lead to performance impairment rather than performance enhancement.…”