Time and context effects after discrimination reversal in human beings (original) (raw)

This research investigates the effects of time and contextual changes on the recovery of a learned discrimination following a reversal in human subjects. Through two experiments, it was demonstrated that a 48-hour retention interval resulted in spontaneous recovery of the original discrimination, and a context shift between training and testing led to renewed performance in the original discrimination task. These phenomena align with the information retrieval theory proposed by Bouton (1993), suggesting that both temporal and contextual factors significantly influence learning and memory retrieval.