Snap Shot
- The question: Does the setting in which an event was experienced, and the setting in which a person later tries to remember it, affect what the person can recall, and can investigators use that relationship to obtain more accurate accounts?
- What the research shows: Memory is cue-dependent, and recall is generally better when cues present at retrieval overlap with those present at encoding. Meta-analytic evidence finds a small average environmental context effect, but individual studies vary and the best-known study did not replicate; the effect shrinks when other strong cues are available. Mentally reinstating the original context is a core component of the Cognitive Interview, which reliably increases correct detail with a smaller increase in errors.
- What it does not show: It does not show that returning a witness to a scene, or any context technique, makes a particular memory accurate, and the classic underwater study has not replicated cleanly. In one laboratory study, physical context reinstatement raised familiarity and confidence more than accuracy in an identification task, while a field study found improved identification.
- The law: Testimony about context and retrieval is assessed under Rule 702 and, in courts-martial, Houser; in Arizona, Chapple and Nordstrom allow general memory testimony in the court’s discretion, and Lindsey bars opinions on a particular witness’s credibility.
- Issues for each side: Prosecutors can explain that failing to recall a detail in an interview room does not show it was never stored and that properly reinstated context can aid accurate recall; defense counsel can examine whether a scene visit or reinstatement exercise introduced new information or inflated confidence, and each side should avoid treating context research as proof about one witness.
Memory is not stored apart from the circumstances in which it was formed. When a person experiences an event, the surroundings, background sounds and odors, the person’s own physical and emotional condition, and whatever else was going on are stored with it. Those features can later serve as cues that help bring the memory back. Because of this, a memory may be easier to retrieve in conditions that resemble the original ones and harder to retrieve in conditions that do not. Psychologists call these context effects.
Context effects reach court in several ways. Investigators use context reinstatement, usually by asking a witness to mentally recreate the setting, as part of structured interviews. Witnesses are sometimes taken back to a scene. And when a witness recalls a detail in a later interview that was not reported earlier, the parties may dispute whether the new detail reflects better retrieval cues or something else. The research supports some of the claims made in these settings and not others.
This paper describes the principle of encoding specificity, the evidence on environmental context-dependent memory (including a failed replication of the best-known study), mental context reinstatement in the Cognitive Interview, physical revisits to a scene, and the limits of the evidence. Internal states such as mood and intoxication as retrieval cues are addressed in the companion paper Mood-Congruent and State-Dependent Memory.
Memory Is Cue-Dependent
Much apparent forgetting is a failure of retrieval rather than a loss of the stored memory. In a classic demonstration, people who studied categorized word lists and could not freely recall many of the words recalled substantially more when they were given the category names as cues, showing that information can be available in memory without being accessible at a given moment (Tulving & Pearlstone, 1966). The principle that explains when a cue works is encoding specificity: a retrieval cue helps to the extent that it matches the way the information was encoded at the time (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). A cue that seems logically related to a memory may fail if it was not part of the original encoding, and a cue that seems trivial may succeed if it was.
Lane and Houston (2021, p. 16) summarize the forensic implication: retrieval depends on cues, and failure to recall something on one occasion does not show it was never stored. The same principle has a second implication that is equally important. Cues can shape what is reported as well as unlock it. A cue supplied by an interviewer, a document, or another person can bring back a genuine memory, but it can also suggest content that was not there, a problem addressed in the papers on misinformation and external sources of distortion.
Context cues are one kind of retrieval cue. Researchers distinguish the external environment (the room, the outdoor setting, background sounds or odors), the person’s internal state (mood, alertness, intoxication), and the cognitive context (what the person was thinking about or doing at the time). Each can become bound to a memory, and each may be absent when the person later tries to remember in a different setting.
Environmental Context-Dependent Memory
The best-known demonstration is the study by Godden and Baddeley (1975), in which amateur divers learned lists of spoken words either on the shore or underwater in open water near Oban, Scotland, and were then tested in the same or the other environment. Recall was higher when the testing environment matched the learning environment, whichever environment that was. According to the replication report, the underwater sessions took place in cold open water at a reported depth of 7 metres, about 23 feet (Murre, 2021). The study became one of the most widely taught findings in memory research.
It has not replicated cleanly. In a preregistered replication with sixteen divers, each tested in all four combinations of learning and recall environments, recall in the matching environment was not better than recall in the mismatching one (Murre, 2021), and a corrected reanalysis reinforced that conclusion (Murre, 2022). The replication differed from the original in ways that may matter: it used a heated indoor pool about 180 cm deep rather than cold open water, and it ran all conditions in a single day rather than over four days (Murre, 2021). The failure does not show that context effects are absent, but it does show that the classic study is a weaker foundation than its textbook status suggests.
The broader literature supports a qualified conclusion. A meta-analysis of incidental environmental context studies found a small average context effect, and that it was reduced when people relied on non-contextual cues during learning or at test, and when people mentally reinstated the original context at test (Smith & Vela, 2001). In other words, the physical setting matters most when little else is available to guide retrieval. A 2026 meta-analysis of 33 studies found that context reinstatement improved memory by a small-to-moderate amount (Hedges’ g = 0.32) and that older adults benefited as much as younger adults, while noting that the effect tended to be weaker when the alternative context at test was familiar rather than novel (Symeonidou et al., 2026).
Recent work using virtual reality, which allows researchers to build distinct environments that are hard to create in a laboratory, has found context effects under some conditions and not others. Participants recalled more items in the same virtual environment as the one in which they learned them, particularly items that fit the environment’s theme (Shin et al., 2021). A larger study replicated the recall advantage, but participants tested in the same environment also falsely recognized more similar lures, and a schema-congruent environment aided recall but not recognition (Koch & Coutanche, 2024). Learning material in distinctive virtual contexts has also reduced interference between similar material, an advantage that depended on participants experiencing the environments as real and on mental reinstatement of the learning context (Essoe et al., 2022). These studies used word lists and objects rather than witnessed crimes, and their main value here is in showing the conditions that make context effects larger or smaller.
Mental Context Reinstatement in the Cognitive Interview
Because physical settings often cannot be recreated, investigative interviewing relies chiefly on mental reinstatement. The Cognitive Interview, developed from memory research, asks the witness to recreate in mind the surroundings of the event, including the layout, lighting, sounds, smells, and the witness’s own thoughts and feelings at the time, before giving a free narrative (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992). Mental reinstatement is one of several components, alongside rapport building, transferring control of the interview to the witness, encouraging a full report, and open-ended questioning (Fisher & Schreiber, 2007; Fisher & Geiselman, 1992). Its rationale is encoding specificity: recreating the original context should make more of the original cues available.
A meta-analysis of 25 years of research found that the Cognitive Interview reliably increased the amount of correct information reported, with a smaller increase in incorrect details, so that accuracy rates were generally similar to those of comparison interviews (Memon et al., 2010). Lane and Houston (2021, pp. 13, 130–131) describe context reinstatement as one of the ways interviewers can help a witness and note the meta-analytic support for more correct information without a loss of accuracy. The Cognitive Interview has had little effect on identification accuracy, as distinct from recall of event details (Fisher & Schreiber, 2007).
The contribution of mental reinstatement alone is less certain than that of the full interview. In one experiment with 234 participants who watched a naturalistic film, those who received mental reinstatement before free recall reported more details that could not be checked, but not more accurate details, although they did better on cued questions and rated their memories as more vivid and more like reliving the event (Faber et al., 2023). A similar pattern appeared when adults recalled one instance of a repeated activity: reinstatement increased additional, unverifiable details without changing reports of the checkable items (Sharman et al., 2022). On the other hand, mock witnesses who described their reinstated images aloud during an interview the day after a staged collision later recalled more correct details at a one-week delay than those who reinstated silently, although immediate recall did not differ (Gawrylowicz & Pereira, 2024). The fair summary is that the full Cognitive Interview is well supported, while the separate effect of the reinstatement step varies with how it is done and what is measured.
Revisiting the Scene and Physical Reinstatement
Investigators sometimes return a witness to the location of an event, or show photographs of it, to aid recall. Physical reinstatement can help. In a field experiment in which store clerks later attempted to identify a customer they had dealt with, cues that reinstated the earlier encounter improved identification performance (Krafka & Penrod, 1985). In a laboratory study, testing mock witnesses in the same room in which they had watched a staged theft improved free recall of central and peripheral details and improved identification accuracy when the culprit was in the lineup (Wong & Read, 2011).
The same study showed costs. Reinstating the physical context made lineup members seem more familiar, increased willingness to choose someone, and raised confidence more than it raised accuracy (Wong & Read, 2011). Scene visits raise further practical concerns. A scene is rarely unchanged by the time of a visit; lighting, season, and layout may differ, and a visit may expose the witness to new information, such as police markings, other people’s accounts, or details the witness did not originally notice, that can be incorporated into later reports. For these reasons the Cognitive Interview relies on mental rather than physical reinstatement (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992). Where a scene visit occurs, the record of what the witness said before and during it, and what the witness was shown or told, is what allows its effect to be evaluated.
Context and Third-Party Judgments
Context also affects people who evaluate evidence. In the forensic comparison disciplines, information about the case is a form of context that can shift judgments. In experiments in which participants judged whether fingerprint pairs matched, information about a serious crime made participants more willing to declare a match without making them better at distinguishing true matches from non-matches, while familiarity with previously seen cases also influenced judgments (Searston et al., 2016). Reviews of forensic confirmation bias describe how task-irrelevant information can influence examiners’ conclusions and recommend procedures that limit examiners’ exposure to such information (Kassin et al., 2013). This is a different mechanism from the encoding-retrieval match described above, and it is addressed in the Confirmation Bias paper.
Limits of the Evidence
Most context research uses word lists, objects, or short films, studied by university students under low stakes, with retention intervals of minutes to a week. Witnessed crimes involve personal involvement, emotion, and delays of months or years, and the research does not settle how context effects operate under those conditions. Meta-analytic evidence finds a small average environmental context effect, individual studies vary considerably, and the best-known demonstration did not replicate in its first published attempt (Murre, 2021). Effects are smaller when strong non-contextual cues are present (Smith & Vela, 2001), which describes many interviews in which witnesses are asked specific questions.
Measures matter. Reinstatement can increase the number of details reported, including details that cannot be verified, and can increase vividness and confidence without a corresponding increase in accuracy (Faber et al., 2023; Wong & Read, 2011). Benefits for free recall do not necessarily carry over to recognition or identification (Fisher & Schreiber, 2007; Koch & Coutanche, 2024). Above all, group research describes average tendencies under defined conditions. It cannot determine whether a particular detail recalled after reinstatement or a scene visit is accurate, or whether a particular failure to recall was due to a mismatch of context.
Questions to Ask About This Research
When the underwater study of Godden and Baddeley (1975) is offered to explain why a witness could recall a detail only after returning to a setting, counsel should ask whether the conclusion follows and whether it has held up: the study involved divers recalling word lists after four minutes, and a preregistered replication did not find the effect (Murre, 2021). When context reinstatement is said to have produced a more accurate account, counsel should ask what exactly was counted, because some studies show more unverifiable details and greater vividness rather than more accurate ones (Faber et al., 2023), and whether the finding applies to this person, given how the reinstatement in this case was carried out and what the witness said before it. When a scene visit or a reinstatement exercise preceded an identification, counsel should ask how large the effect is on accuracy as against confidence and willingness to choose, because Wong and Read (2011) found that confidence rose more than accuracy. In every case, the question is whether a group tendency resolves anything about this witness’s recollection. These questions are explained in “Reading Research Claims: A Guide for Attorneys” on this site.
Context Effects and the Law
Federal and Military Standards
Expert testimony about context and retrieval is governed by Federal Rule of Evidence 702, as amended December 1, 2023, under which the proponent must show the court that it is more likely than not that the rule’s requirements are met, including that the opinion reflects a reliable application of reliable methods to the case. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993) made the trial judge a gatekeeper, and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (1999) extended that gatekeeping obligation to all expert testimony, including testimony based on technical or other specialized knowledge. In courts-martial, Military Rule of Evidence 702 tracks the federal rule, and the 2023 federal amendment took effect in the military rule in 2025 through Military Rule of Evidence 1102 (Joint Service Committee on Military Justice, 2025); practitioners should confirm current text. Military judges apply the six factors of United States v. Houser (1993). Context-effects testimony is ordinarily general and educational, explaining how retrieval cues and interview methods affect what is recalled; the replication record discussed above bears on the reliability inquiry.
Arizona
Arizona Rule of Evidence 702 adopted the federal formulation and the Daubert standard effective January 1, 2012, and was amended effective January 1, 2024, to conform to the 2023 federal amendment (Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004). State v. Chapple (1983) is Arizona’s leading case on expert testimony about the reliability of memory and eyewitness accounts: excluding a qualified expert was an abuse of discretion on its facts, while admission generally remains within the trial court’s discretion, and State v. Nordstrom (2001) approved limiting such an expert to general factors without opinions on the accuracy of a particular witness. Experts may not opine on whether a particular witness is truthful or quantify how often witnesses of a given type are truthful (State v. Lindsey, 1986, 149 Ariz. at 475–76).
Special Issues in Legal Practice
The principles described above apply with equal force to every party in a legal proceeding. The science operates the same way regardless of who is asking the questions, and the research summarized here does not by itself favor either side. What differs between the parties is not the science but the vantage point — the particular places where these issues tend to surface, and the particular errors each party is best positioned to guard against. The two summaries below identify those recurring issues. They are offered for orientation, not as litigation strategy; in every case the controlling question is what the evidence in that case will, and will not, support, and the expert’s role is to inform the trier of fact rather than to advocate for either side.
Special Issues for Prosecutors
The research supports several propositions prosecutors can legitimately present. Retrieval depends on cues, so a witness’s failure to recall a detail in one setting does not show that the detail was never stored, and a detail recalled later, with better cues, is not suspect for that reason alone. The Cognitive Interview, which includes mental reinstatement of context, reliably produces more correct information than comparison interviews with a smaller increase in errors, and interviews conducted with its open-ended methods yield accounts whose development can be documented. Prosecutors and investigators can strengthen the evidentiary value of witness accounts by recording what a witness reported before any reinstatement exercise or scene visit and by documenting what the witness was shown or told.
The research also counsels caution. The best-known environmental context study has not replicated, and the average environmental effect is small and varies across studies, so testimony that a return to a scene explains a particular recovered detail goes beyond the evidence. Reinstatement can increase vividness, unverifiable detail, and confidence without increasing accuracy, and physical reinstatement can increase willingness to choose from a lineup. A scene visit can expose a witness to new information. Case context can also shift forensic examiners’ judgments, which supports limiting examiners’ exposure to task-irrelevant information.
Special Issues for Defense
The research supports several propositions defense counsel can legitimately present. In one laboratory study, physical reinstatement raised familiarity and confidence more than accuracy in an identification task (Wong & Read, 2011), whereas a field study found improved identification (Krafka & Penrod, 1985), and benefits for free recall do not necessarily extend to identification. A scene visit or poorly conducted reinstatement can introduce post-event information, and a detail that first appears after such an exercise warrants comparison with what the witness said before and with what was available to the witness at the scene. In laboratory experiments with fingerprint pairs, information about a serious crime made participants more willing to declare a match without improving their ability to tell matches from non-matches (Searston et al., 2016); whether practicing examiners respond the same way is a separate question.
The research also counsels caution about the limits that apply to the defense. Context research does not show that a detail recalled after reinstatement is inaccurate; the Cognitive Interview increases correct information more than errors, so details reported after a properly conducted reinstatement are frequently, though not always, accurate. The failed replication of the underwater study does not show that cues are irrelevant to retrieval, which rests on a broad body of evidence. An expert cannot tell the factfinder that a particular detail was produced by a scene visit or that a particular identification was inflated by context; those questions depend on the record of what the witness said and was exposed to.
This paper is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice. The author is a psychologist, not an attorney; summaries of law are general and must be verified against current authority or with a licensed attorney.
References
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Fisher, R. P., & Geiselman, R. E. (1992). Memory-enhancing techniques for investigative interviewing: The cognitive interview. Charles C Thomas.
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Kassin, S. M., Dror, I. E., & Kukucka, J. (2013). The forensic confirmation bias: Problems, perspectives, and proposed solutions. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 2(1), 42–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2013.01.001
Koch, G. E., & Coutanche, M. N. (2024). Context reinstatement requires a schema relevant virtual environment to benefit object recall. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 31(5), 2205–2213. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02472-w
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Legal Authorities
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).
Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999).
State v. Chapple, 135 Ariz. 281, 660 P.2d 1208 (1983).
State v. Lindsey, 149 Ariz. 472, 720 P.2d 73 (1986).
State v. Nordstrom, 200 Ariz. 229, 25 P.3d 717 (2001).
United States v. Houser, 36 M.J. 392 (C.M.A. 1993).
Fed. R. Evid. 702.
Mil. R. Evid. 702.
Mil. R. Evid. 1102.
Ariz. R. Evid. 702.
Ariz. Sup. Ct. Order R-23-0004 (amending Ariz. R. Evid. 702, effective Jan. 1, 2024).
Related topic papers: Mood-Congruent and State-Dependent Memory · Improving Eyewitness Memory · Delayed Recall · Forgetting · The Misinformation Effect · Confirmation Bias