Original Article

Clark, Daniel P. A. and Bruno, Davide (2021) Original Article. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. ISSN 1747-0226 (Accepted for Publication)

Text Clark and Bruno In press.pdf - Accepted Version Download (859kB)

Abstract

There is disagreement in the literature as to whether episodic memory maintains an inherent temporal organisation, that is, whether learned items are necessarily organised along some temporal dimension or whether temporal organisation is a task-specific occurrence. The current series of experiments explored this issue. In Experiment 1, we tested whether temporal or spatial contiguity was present in an incidental encoding task where either strategy (but not both together) could be employed at test. In Experiment 2, we attempted to facilitate the use of a spatial retrieval strategy at test by asking participants to recall the location where target items had been displayed at study, after incidental encoding. Experiment 3 explored the role of study-test congruency by informing participants at encoding that they would be tested on either their memory for the temporal sequence or spatial locations, and then testing both at retrieval. Finally, Experiment 4 employed a masking task at encoding to ensure participants could not predict the true nature of the task, despite it being incidental, and a surprise free recall task. Predominantly, participants displayed recall performance consistent with temporal contiguity, although there was evidence for spatial contiguity under certain conditions. These results are consistent with the notion that episodic memory has a stable and predictable temporal organisation.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Dan Clark
Date Deposited:	25 Jan 2021 10:27
Last Modified:	25 Jan 2021 10:27
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3231

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