Contextual familiarity rescues the cost of switching

Changes in context influence the way we form and structure memories. Yet, little is known about how qualitatively different types of context change shape memory organization. The current experiments characterize how different features of context change influence the structure and organization of free recall. Participants completed a context switching paradigm in which we manipulated the frequency of switches and prior experience with the contexts participants were switching between (familiar vs. novel). We then measured immediate and delayed free recall performance and determined the extent to which participants organized items by the order in which they were encoded or the type of context with which they were originally presented. Across two experiments, we found and replicated that rapidly switching to novel, but not familiar contexts, impaired memory recall performance and biased memory towards a greater reliance on temporal information. Critically, we observed that these differences in performance may be due to distinctions in how participants organize their recalls when rapidly switching contexts. Results indicated that participants made more recall transitions to items in a subsequent context when the contexts are repeating, as compared to when the contexts are novel. Overall, our findings support a model in which contextual familiarity rescues the costs associated with rapidly switching to new tasks or contexts.