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. —decontextualize vb.