The Effects Of Context Mental Reinstatement On Context-Dependent Forgetting

Context-dependent forgetting refers to the phenomenon of memory decrease that dues to the mismatch between the retrieval context and the encoding context.And exploring how to effectively reduce the context-dependent forgetting has been a hotspot in memory psychology.The early methods of reducing the context-dependent forgetting had many restrictions,and the reducing effect were not good enough.Recently,Brinegar proposed the strategy of retrieval context mental reinstatement.This strategy can effectively reduce the context-dependent forgetting,but it can't be used when the retrieval context is not known in advance.In order to make the strategy more feasible and explore the effects of context mental reinstatement on context-dependent forgetting,this research investigated whether the encoding context mental reinstatement and the virtual context mental reinstatement can effectively reduce the context-dependent forgetting.And this research also investigated the reason that the context mental reinstatement can effectively reduce the context-dependent forgetting.Experiment 1 investigated whether the encoding context mental reinstatement can effectively reduce the context-dependent forgetting.Based on the experiment 1 and the research of Brinegar,experiment 2 compared the strategy of encoding context mental reinstatement and the strategy of retrieval context mental reinstatement.In addition,experiment 2 also investigated the reason that the context mental reinstatement can effectively reduce the context-dependent forgetting.Based on experiment 1 and experiment 2,experiment 3 investigated whether the virtual context mental reinstatement can effectively reduce the context-dependent forgetting,as well as to investigate whether the difficulty of the context mental reinstatement can affect the reducing effect of context-dependent forgetting.This research drew the conclusions as follows.Firstly,regardless of whether the strategy was used,and what kind of strategy was used,the final recall performance of the subjects showed the context-dependent forgetting,the context-dependent forgetting is ubiquitous.Secondly,all the three strategies can reduce the context-dependent forgetting,because the use of the strategy of context mental reinstatement made the subjects recall through the strategy of context mental reinstatement more likely and easily.Thirdly,the reducing effect of the strategy of retr:ieval context mental reinstatement and the strategy of virtual context mental reinstatement was better than that of the strategy of encoding context mental reinstatement,because the first two strategies had more context retrieval cues.