A Role for Context-Cued Study-Phase Retrievals in Episodic Memory Updating

Navigating changes is fundamental to everyday life and requires updating existing memories to incorporate new details. This study examined mechanisms underlying how reinstating an earlier event’s context during a later event influences memory for both events. Two theories predict opposite outcomes. Interference theory holds that reinstating context from an existing memory while experiencing a new, overlapping event produces response competition and impairs memory for both. In contrast, integration theory predicts that context reinstatement cues retrieval of earlier memories, enabling associative encoding of past and present events that enhances memory. Prior work favors the latter, showing that reinstatement improves memory. Three experiments extended this work by directly testing roles for study-phase retrievals and change awareness during study and test. Word pairs with shared cues but changed responses (A-B, A-D) were presented with background contexts that either repeated or changed. Repeating contexts increased detection of changes and recall of earlier responses during study, both indexes of study-phase retrievals, as well as later cued recall of earlier (B) and changed (D) responses. The recall benefit was proportional to the extent of study-phase retrievals, implicating retrieval practice. Moreover, the effect was enhanced when participants remembered that changes had occurred, highlighting the role of recollecting integrated representations that included change attributes. These findings align with integration theory, suggesting that memory updating is most effective when current events cue retrieval of prior memories and engender associative encoding of past and present events, establishing elaborate representations that support subsequent recall.