[SubiculumCode]

Context changes impose substantial cognitive costs, disrupting reaction times, perception, and attention maintenance, and yes, memory. Context has a huge role in memory, and context shifts can lead you to not recognize familar people, like encountering your college professor at a dinner party.

The ability to perform in spite of context changes improves over childhood into adolescence, but the costs remain there and will become more pronounced as working memory loads or task demands increase.

Those who design GUIs should really take this into account. When, for example, clicking on a menu replaces the whole screen, like a version of Windows experimented with on the start menu, the complete context change imposes real costs on cognition.

I apologize for not providing citations, but a google scholar search will quickly provide relevant materials; this comment was written from what I learned in my PhD studies on the development of memory.