Usually, when you share memories with a friend, you can recount some events in much more detail.
Clinical psychologist Vanessa van Ast conductsresearch on episodic and emotional memories and under what conditions they change. Van Ast explains that one of the key findings of her research is that the environment in which people remember an experience has a big impact on how they remember it.
She conducted an experiment in which participantssaw some words in a certain context and had to come up with a story based on those words. The next day, participants underwent a similar “experience,” but the original words were sequentially paired with new words. On the third day, a memory test was administered to determine the extent to which participants could still recall the associated words.
The results showed that when two experimentsoccurred in the same context, both memories, as well as associations between them, were imprinted much deeper. But when they took place in different contexts, the second experience was remembered to the detriment of the original. And the associations between them were also remembered worse.
Van Ast concluded that when changingspatial context, our memory switches to this new context. “Our brain obviously prefers a new context over the original memory,” the expert explained her position.
Source: NeuroScience News