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

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Environmental Psychology
• Spatial Cognition

Background:

• Memory and environment research is fragmented across disciplines.
• The term 'environment' is inconsistently defined (e.g., broad categories, spatial features, contextual structures).
• Different research traditions often examine overlapping questions about memory and environment in isolation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To organize the diverse literature on environment and memory into distinct traditions.
• To clarify how different conceptualizations of the environment shape memory research.
• To propose a structured framework for understanding the environment's role in memory.

Main Methods:

• Literature review synthesizing research from neuroscience, environmental psychology, and spatial cognition.
• Categorization of studies into three traditions: category-based, feature-based, and context-based accounts.
• Analysis of how each tradition links environmental properties to specific memory systems and mechanisms.

Main Results:

• Category-based approaches link environment to attention and working memory.
• Feature-based approaches connect environment to navigation and spatial representation.
• Context-based approaches relate environment to episodic encoding and retrieval.
• Environment serves memory as structure, navigational scaffold, or retrieval cue.

Conclusions:

• A structured account of environment-memory interactions clarifies conceptual diversity.
• Recognizing distinct environmental roles (structure, scaffold, cue) advances memory research.
• This framework identifies future research directions in environment-memory relationships.