A new study suggests that reactivating one memory may unintentionally strengthen other related memories stored in the brain, even if those memories are not directly recalled. Researchers say the findings offer valuable insight into how memories are connected and organized through shared experiences and environments.
“Memory reactivation has been shown to strengthen reactivated memories, but its effects on related, non-reactivated memories remain unclear,”
wrote Juan Cruz Beron, Luz Bavassi and their colleagues in their paper.
“This study investigated whether reactivation of a consolidated target memory could indirectly enhance the retention of peripheral information acquired in the same context.”
During the first stage of the study, participants learned face-name associations together with images of everyday objects. All of the information was presented within the same environment, allowing the memories to become linked through a shared context. Researchers believed these contextual connections might influence how memories are stored and later retrieved.
In the following phase, some participants received reminders specifically designed to reactivate the previously learned face-name memories. Importantly, the object-related memories were not directly reviewed during this process. Another group of participants completed unrelated tasks instead of memory reactivation exercises.
When researchers later tested participants’ memory performance, they discovered that individuals who underwent memory reactivation not only remembered the face-name pairs more accurately but also showed improved recall of the unrelated objects learned in the same setting. However, this indirect strengthening effect disappeared when the objects had originally been learned in a different context or environment.
The said
“Results revealed that reactivation significantly improved the retention of target and peripheral memories when acquired in the same context,”
“However, when peripheral memories were learned in a different context, reactivation of the target memory did not produce the same indirect strengthening effect.
“These findings suggest that the indirect strengthening of consolidated memories through reactivation is context-dependent and may rely on the shared spatiotemporal acquisition context.”
