What Counts as an Environment in Memory Research? Conceptualizing Environment Across Memory Traditions

Research on memory and the physical environment has expanded across neuroscience, environmental psychology, and spatial cognition. Yet the literature remains conceptually diverse. A central reason is that the term environment is used to refer to different kinds of phenomena across traditions. In some studies, environment is treated as a broad category, such as natural versus urban. In others, it is defined through spatial and perceptual features, such as landmarks or space geometry. It is also understood as a contextual or event-related structure that becomes bound to experience and later supports retrieval. These approaches are often discussed separately, even when they address overlapping questions about memory. This review organizes the field into three broad traditions: category-based, feature-based, and context-based accounts. We show how each tradition foregrounds different environmental properties, memory systems, and mechanisms. Category-based work most often links environment to attention and working memory, feature-based work to navigation and spatial representation, and context-based work to episodic encoding and retrieval. By placing these traditions side by side, the review clarifies how the environment has been conceptualized in memory research and how different assumptions about environment shape the questions asked, the methods used, and the kinds of memory effects that become visible. The review further proposes that environment can be understood as contributing to memory in at least three roles: as structure, as navigational scaffold, and as cue. Together, these distinctions provide a structured account of a diverse field and identify directions for future work on the relationship between environment and memory.