Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Reinstatement and the Contiguity Effect

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

David Halpern¹, Michael Kahana²; ¹University of Pennsylvania

Many theories of memory suggest a role for reinstatement in strengthening previously encoded items. Reinstatement is typically thought of as covert repetition, and possibly elaboration, of these past events. However, repetition in multiple contexts inherently creates the potential for interference. Despite this, empirically, people tend to successively recall items presented at neighboring serial positions, a phenomenon known as the contiguity effect. This suggests that interference due to reinstatement is not significant, either because reinstatement is a rare occurrence or because the memory system is able to mitigate such interference. In this project, we explore the feasibility of the latter option using both modeling and electrophysiological data. We fit retrieved context models to data on overt rehearsal and show that context reinstatement during a study phase is one potential mechanism for mitigating interference. Using representational similarity analyses, we plan to explore study phase context reinstatement in both scalp and intracranial EEG during a free recall task with repeated items. In particular, we aim to investigate whether greater context reinstatement relates to a subsequent increase in the probability of contiguous retrieval. Overall, we demonstrate the key role of context reinstatement in maintaining temporal associations.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic