State-dependent learning

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State-dependent learning is an idea of learning and recalling that is based upon the physiological and mental state of the organism.

Factors affecting state-dependent learning may include: environment, intoxication, emotional state, and sensory modality.

For example, people in a drunken state remember events when they were drunk, but they cannot remember when they are sober.

In neuropsychopharmacology, State-dependent learning denotes the fact that information that has been learned while the animal is under the influence of a certain drug (“state”) can only be recalled and used to solve a task when the animal is in the same state in which the information was learned, but not in a different, i.e., undrugged state (Colpaert, 1990 [1] and Carlezone et al., 1995 ). (definition quoted from [2])

A recently identified type of context-dependent learning is the effect of language. Research by Marian et al (2007)^[1] demonstrated that participants were more likely to identify an English answer to a question when asked in English and a Mandarin answer to a question when asked in Mandarin. This illustrates that the linguistic context of a memory may be encoded during learning.