Sharing a Context with Other Rewarding Events Increases the Probability that Neutral Events will be Recollected

Abstract

Although reward is known to enhance memory for reward-predicting events, the extent to which such memory effects spread to associated (neutral) events is unclear. Using a between-subject design, we examined how sharing a background context with rewarding events influenced memory for motivationally neutral events (tested after a 5 days delay). We found that sharing a visually rich context with rewarding objects during encoding increased the probability that neutral objects would be successfully recollected during memory test, as opposed to merely being recognized without any recall of associative detail. In contrast, such an effect was not seen when the context was not explicitly demarcated and objects were presented against a blank black background. These qualitative changes in memory were observed in the absence of any effects on overall recognition (as measured by d′). Additionally, a follow-up study failed to find any evidence to suggest that the mere presence of a context picture in the background during encoding (i.e., without the reward manipulation) produced any such qualitative changes in memory. These results suggest that reward enhances recollection for rewarding objects as well as other non-rewarding events that are representationally linked to the same context.

False memories, false preferences: Flexible retrieval mechanisms supporting successful inference bias novel decisions.

“…Further, previous research suggests that the reward-context tied to a previously learned item can spread to an associated item, indirectly linking the unrewarded associate to the reward-context itself (Wimmer & Shohamy, 2012). Thus, reward-related learning mechanisms may allow for the generalization or spreading of value within associative pairs (Wimmer & Shohamy, 2012; for a discussion of how this spreading of value affects memory see Loh, Deacon, de Boer, Dolan, & Duzel, 2016).…”

Social targets improve body-based and environment-based strategies during spatial navigation

“…Furthermore, due to the influence of reward on event recollection (Loh et al 2015(Loh et al , 2016Shigemune et al 2017), increased reward to correctly identify the position of a person in space compared to the position of an object in space may be relevant. Dopaminergic modulations of hippocampal processing (Wittmann et al 2005) may be influenced by social reward (Gossen et al 2014).…”

Prediction error is out of context: The dominance of contextual stability in segmenting episodic events

“…An alternative mechanism of event segmentation named contextual stability suggests that expected and meaningful transitions across stable contexts generate event boundaries (DuBrow & Davachi, 2016;Wang & Egner, 2022). Stable contexts can be formed by coherent narratives (Ezzyat & Davachi, 2011), object categories (DuBrow & Davachi, 2016), task rules (Wang & Egner, 2022), or reward values (Loh et al, 2016). Contextual overlap is suggested to be necessary for coherent temporal encoding of events (Qiu et al, 2023) and forming strong associations (Polyn et al, 2009), mechanisms which are all integral elements of segmented memories.…”