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Comparing integration and contextual binding accounts of memory impairment

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 20, page 506 (2019)Cite this article

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In their recent Opinion (A contextual binding theory of episodic memory: systems consolidation reconsidered. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 20, 364–375 (2019))1, Yonelinas et al. reconsidered the standard systems consolidation theory (SSCT)2,3 and proposed the contextual binding theory (CBT). For these authors, the long-term development of memory and forgetting can be explained by the way information has been bound during memory formation. Information will be forgotten because different material that occurs in the same context interferes with the item to be learned. The authors propose that CBT can explain better than the SSCT several forgetting effects, including interference effects and retrograde amnesia after post-training hippocampal lesions.

We were pleased to see that this CBT view has much in common with our own ‘integration concept’ (IC), which we introduced to challenge the consolidation–reconsolidation hypothesis4,5. According to the IC, memories, when in an active state (after training or reactivation), become malleable and integrate new information that is present. Depending on the information available at that time, memories can be updated, strengthened (by coherent information), disrupted (by incoherent information resulting from, for example, amnesic treatments or interference) or greatly altered (false memory). We have described evidence5,6 showing that performance disruption due to post-training amnesic treatments mainly results from impairments in retrieval that are induced by contextual differences between training and testing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut des Neurosciences Paris-Saclay (Neuro-PSI), Université Paris-Sud, CNRS UMR 9197, Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France

    Pascale Gisquet-Verrier

  2. Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA

    David Riccio

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  1. Pascale Gisquet-Verrier
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  2. David Riccio
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Correspondence to Pascale Gisquet-Verrier.

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Gisquet-Verrier, P., Riccio, D. Comparing integration and contextual binding accounts of memory impairment. Nat Rev Neurosci 20, 506 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-019-0188-3

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