While the influence of context on long-term memory (LTM) is well documented, its effects on the interaction between working memory (WM) and LTM remain less understood. In this study, we explored these interactions using a delayed match-to-sample task, where participants (6 males, 16 females) encountered the same target object across six consecutive trials, facilitating the transition from WM to LTM. During half of these target repetitions, the background color changed. We measured the WM storage of the target using the contralateral delay activity in electroencephalography. Our results reveal that task-irrelevant context changes trigger the reactivation of long-term memories in WM. This reactivation may be attributed to content–context binding in WM and hippocampal pattern separation.

虽然背景对长期记忆 (LTM) 的影响已有充分记录，但其对工作记忆 (WM) 和 LTM 之间相互作用的影响仍知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们使用延迟匹配样本任务来探索这些相互作用，其中参与者（6 名男性，16 名女性）在连续六次试验中遇到相同的目标对象，从而促进从 WM 到 LTM 的过渡。在一半的目标重复过程中，背景颜色发生了变化。我们使用脑电图中的对侧延迟活动测量了目标的 WM 存储。我们的结果表明，与任务无关的情境变化会触发 WM 中长期记忆的重新激活。这种重新激活可能归因于 WM 中的内容-上下文结合和海马模式分离。