The influence of social anxiety-provoking contexts on context reinstatement effects.

ABSTRACT: The context reinstatement (CR) effect is the finding that target stimuli are better remembered when presented in the same context as during initial encoding, compared with a different context. It remains unclear, however, whether emotional features of the context affect this memory benefit. In two experiments, we investigated whether the anxiety-provoking nature of a context scene might influence the CR effect. During encoding, participants viewed target faces paired with scenes validated as either highly anxiety-provoking or not, half of which contained other faces embedded within the scene. During retrieval, target faces were presented again with either the same or a new context scene. In Experiment 1, the expected CR effect was observed when the contexts were low-anxiety scenes or high-

SUBMITTER: Yeung RC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8189001 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature