ABSTRACT
An item that is isolated from the surrounding context is better remembered than an item that is consistent with the context. This isolation effect does not occur because an increase in salience at the time of encoding because it also occurs at the first serial position when the context is unknown. Furthermore, it cannot be accounted for by improvised retrieval of the context items because the isolated item is better recalled than a control list consisting of equally different items. This paper suggests that these aspects of the isolation effect can be accounted for by introducing neural plausible mechanisms of synaptic plasticity in an artificial neural network. In particular, it is shown that a sliding modification threshold and bounded synaptic strength can account for the isolation, the primacy, and the recency effects.
