The Role of Context in Episodic Memory

In this chapter we discuss the role of context in organizing episodic memories. We define context as slowly drifting information (i.e. information that persists over a relatively long time scale in the person's brain; for example, a representation of the person's location). First, we use the Temporal Context Model of memory search (Howard & Kahana, 2002) to illustrate how binding slowly-drifting contextual information to more transient representations (e.g. of studied words) serves to organize our memories of the more transient information. We next present electrophysiological studies examining the role of slowly drifting representations in organizing episodic memories, and we provide an overview of the brain systems involved in representing slowly drifting information. Finally, we discuss sources of variability in the rate of contextual drift.