n.1. the process of isolating a constituent from its normal or expected context. It may occur deliberately, as when visual artists isolate a familiar object from its everyday context by turning it upside down or vastly expanding its size to reveal a new perspective about it, or nonconsciously, as when one’s memory of a traumatic event becomes dissociated from the context in which the trauma occurred and acquires a quality of unreality. 2. in the study of perception, the process of making implicit stimulus features explicit and testable, as in the Ames room and many other perceptual demonstrations. —decontextualizevb.