Temporal Proximity Links Unrelated News Events in Memory

Uitvlugt, Mitchell G.; Healey, M. Karl

doi:10.1177/0956797618808474

Cited by 38 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 41 publications

(61 reference statements)

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“…Nor can such temporal organization be driven by schematic or script-like knowledge, as has been hypothesized for autobiographical memories (Anderson & Conway, 1993), given that the tour items were idiosyncratic and their order was arbitrary. Studies examining naturalistic events separated by months or years (Moreton & Ward, 2010;Uitvlugt & Healey, 2018) found temporal clustering only at the shortest lags, which may partly reflect direct event-to-event associations or reference to temporal landmarks (Friedman, 2004). Our finding of a temporally graded and forward-asymmetric contiguity effect extends principles from word list recall unambiguously to remote naturalistic event recall.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 54%

“…Although researchers have investigated macro-scale temporal organization across discrete events spanning participants' autobiographical timelines (e.g. Friedman, 2004;Moreton & Ward, 2010;Uitvlugt & Healey, 2018), little is known about micro-scale temporal organization in recall of extended real-world episodes, the basic units of episodic and autobiographical memory (Anderson & Conway, 1993).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Linking detail to temporal structure in naturalistic event recall

Diamond¹,

Levine²

2019

Preprint

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Decades of research demonstrates the importance of temporal structure in recall dynamics of laboratory stimuli (i.e. word lists) at seconds-long delays. Little is known, however, about such structure in recall of richer and more remote real-world experiences (i.e. autobiographical memories), where the focus is usually on quantifying memory detail without reference to known event sequences. Here, 119 younger and older participants freely recalled controlled real-world episodes, for which the encoding sequence was verified, after two days or one week. We paired analytical tools from the list-learning and autobiographical memory literatures to measure contextual dynamics and details within extended recall narratives. Aging was associated with large reductions in both episodic detail richness and temporal organization (contiguity and forward asymmetry) when controlling for atemporal recall properties. Temporal organization was positively associated with detail richness across groups, providing empirical evidence for a theorized link between re-experiencing past events and reinstating their spatiotemporal context.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 54%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Linking detail to temporal structure in naturalistic event recall

Diamond¹,

Levine²

2019

Preprint

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“…One limitation in studies of memory for narratives is that they tend to involve story events that are presented close together in time. In these instances, story events might simply be linked through their temporal proximity (Uitvlugt & Healey, 2019), rather than integration into a narrative per se.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narratives bridge the divide between distant events in episodic memory

Cohn‐Sheehy¹,

Delarazan²,

Crivelli-Decker³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Many studies suggest that information about past experience, or episodic memory, is divided into discrete units called “events.” Paradoxically, we can often remember experiences that span multiple events. Events that occur in close succession might simply be bridged because of their proximity to one another, but many events occur farther apart in time. Intuitively, some kind of organizing principle should enable these temporally-distant events to become bridged in memory. We tested the hypothesis that episodic memory exhibits a narrative-level organization, enabling temporally-distant events to be better remembered if they form a coherent narrative. Furthermore, we tested whether a post-encoding consolidation process is necessary to integrate temporally-distant events. Participants learned and subsequently recalled events from fictional stories, in which pairs of temporally-distant events involving side-characters (“sideplots”) either formed one coherent narrative or two unrelated narratives. In three experiments, participants were cued to recall the stories either immediately, after a 24-hour delay, or after a 12-hour delay which elapsed during daytime (“wake”) versus nighttime (“sleep”). Participants recalled more information about coherent than unrelated narrative events, in most delay conditions, and the delay and sleep manipulations indicated that post-encoding consolidation was not necessary to integrate temporally-distant narrative events. Post-hoc modeling across experiments suggested that sentence-level semantic similarity could not solely account for the coherence benefit. This reliable memory benefit for coherent narrative events supports theoretical accounts which propose that higher-order semantic structures scaffold episodic memory.

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“…The TCE can be readily observed in many laboratory list-learning tasks and even in more naturalistic settings (for a review, see Healey et al, in press). The ubiquity of the TCE has led us to suggest it may arise from processes that are automatic, obligatory, and built into the structure of the memory system Healey et al, in press;Uitvlugt & Healey, 2019;Healey, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of control processes in temporal and semantic contiguity

Healey

Uitvlugt

2019

Mem Cogn

Self Cite

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Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) argued that performance on any memory task reflects the combined influence of both the fixed structure of the memory system and control processes tailored to the specific task. We investigated the role of control processes in governing the temporal contiguity and semantic contiguity effects in free recall-tendencies to organize recall based on proximity in the study list and pre-existing semantic associations. Subjects studied lists that contained four "clusters", each composed of four semantically associated words but presented in random order such that associates were not in adjacent serial positions. Subjects were given either standard free-recall instructions, instructions to focus on order-based associations (i.e., the original order of presentation), or meaning-based associations (i.e., preexisting semantic relationships). Replicating previous work, lists with strong semantic relationships resulted in a reduced overall temporal contiguity effect when recalled under standard free-recall instructions. However, under meaning-based recall instructions, the temporal contiguity effect was nearly eliminated. Detailed analyses of within-cluster transitions and an order reconstruction task revealed that temporal information was encoded, but control processes prevented it from dominating memory search. These results point to a need for more empirical work exploring how control processes change recall dynamics and for more theoretical work modeling the computational basis of these processes.

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Temporal Proximity Links Unrelated News Events in Memory

Cited by 38 publications

References 41 publications

Linking detail to temporal structure in naturalistic event recall

Linking detail to temporal structure in naturalistic event recall

Narratives bridge the divide between distant events in episodic memory

The role of control processes in temporal and semantic contiguity

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