Exploratory Study on the Reinstatement Effect Under 360-Degree Video-Based Virtual Environments

Episodic memory incorporates environmental contexts, and memory retrieval is aided by matching the retrieval context to the encoding context. This study tested whether similar context-dependency of memory could be confirmed in virtual environments. Participants learned words in a 360-degree video-based virtual environment depicting either natural or urban landscapes. Immediately, they completed a test in the same virtual environment. After two days, half of the participants underwent a final test with the same context as that on the initial day, whereas the other half underwent it with a different context. Surprisingly, participants tested in a different context exhibited significantly lower forgetting than those tested in the same context, which contradicted our hypothesis.