The roles of information reactivation and nonassociative arousal in recovery from ECS-induced retrograde amnesia.

Restoration of memory by pretest reminder treatments following ECS-induced amnesia in principle could be mediated by nonassociative arousal and/or reactivation of information by the reminder stimuli. In the present research, arousal value of the reminder treatment was largely a function of the novelty of the context in which the reminder cues occurred. After producing ECS-induced amnesia in rats for a signaled passive avoidance task, presentation of the signal outside of the training and test context proved to be an effective reminder cue. However, prereminder familiarization with the reminder location, which was sufficient to reduce exploratory behavior suggestive of a decrease in the arousal value of the context, did not influence recovery from amnesia. These data indicate that reminder treatments are capable of reversing experimental amnesia by initiating further processing of previously acquired information even when the treatment does not produce appreciable arousal.