Indeed, an inability to appropriately contextualize information may lead to psychological dysfunction characterized by inaccurate percepts or inappropriate responses that contribute to specific psychopathologies. Given the essential role of context in emotion and cognition, a major scientific challenge is to understand how the brain processes contextual information. These social settings strongly influence how we understand the world and ourselves. The individuals with whom we experience life events, as well as the broader cultural contexts in which those experiences take place, often define our experiences. As the aim of this Review is to highlight the common brain circuitry underlying context processing across different species, we opted for a definition of context that is broader, albeit less discriminating. However, the concept of context has been extensively used in the human and clinical literature to refer to general cognitive, semantic or ‘emotional’ backgrounds. This very broad view of context that we adopt here might be criticized as being too general, especially by those investigators who study it in a well-controlled experimental environment in animals. Importantly, contexts can be distinguished from the discrete cues, such as Pavlovian conditional stimuli (CSs) and unconditional stimuli (USs), that they inform 3. As such, contexts enable the flexible representation and retrieval of information and have a central role in resolving ambiguity, all of which are necessary for adaptive behaviour. Context includes perceptions of time, thereby framing the memory of an experience (for recollection, recognition and familiarity) and shaping future expectations of similar experiences (for anticipation, foresight and planning). It assigns contingencies, spatial locations, necessary conditions and special circumstances to salient cues and memory traces. But what is a context? Here, we take a very broad view of context ( BOX 1) and define it as the internal (cognitive and hormonal) and external (environmental and social) backdrop against which psychological processes operate 2. Contexts are routinely encoded without awareness 1. Contexts shape and define the perception of sensory traces, memories of episodes past, the content of thought, the meaning of words and the goals of purposive behaviour. Groucho Marx, Animal Crackers, 1930Ĭontexts serve a psychological function - they are essential for abstracting situationally informed meaning from the world. One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

Thebrain 9 context-sensitive names