Contextual cueing is not flexible

Conscious awareness and memory systems in the brain

The term "memory" typically refers to conscious retrieval of events and experiences from our past, but experience can also change our behaviour without corresponding awareness of the learning process or the associated outcome. Based primarily on early neuropsychological work, theoretical perspectives have distinguished between conscious memory, said to depend critically on structures in the medial temporal lobe (MTL), and a collection of performance-based memories that do not. The most influential of these memory systems perspectives, the declarative memory theory, continues to be a mainstay of scientific work today despite mounting evidence suggesting that contributions of MTL structures go beyond the kinds or types of memory that can be explicitly reported. Consistent with these reports, more recent perspectives have focused increasingly on the processing operations supported by particular brain regions and the qualities or characteristics of resulting representations whether memory is expressed with or without awareness. These alternatives to the standard model generally converge on two key points. First, the hippocampus is critical for relational memory binding and representation even without awareness and, second, there may be little difference between some types of priming and explicit, familiarity-based recognition. Here, we examine the evolution of memory systems perspectives and critically evaluate scientific evidence that has challenged the status quo. Along the way, we highlight some of the challenges that researchers encounter in the context of this work, which can be contentious, and describe innovative methods that have been used to examine unconscious memory in the lab. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory Psychology > Theory and Methods Philosophy > Consciousness.

Spatial context target relearning following a target relocation event: Not mission impossible

Our visual system relies on memory to store and retrieve goal-relevant structures and information from the environment for the purpose of optimizing the allocation of attention. This concept, referred to as contextual cueing, has been demonstrated using visual search tasks, wherein repeated visual contexts lead to reduced search times compared with random displays. Subsequently, when an unexpected change occurs in the environment, or memory fails, a cognitive expense is incurred as the mind tries to resolve the conflict with the memory of the previous environmental context. How memory resolves these conflicts and is updated is of great interest. Previous studies showed that, without extensive practice, individuals were unable to associate a secondary target location with a previously learned spatial context following the relocation of the initially learned target. Here, we explored variables that could potentially affect contextual learning and relearning, such as display size, crowding, context color, and whether the target switched to a previously occupied or unoccupied location. In a series of four experiments, we find relearning occurring in all instances. Previous research may have suffered from underpowered designs.