Past experiences are not usually recalled in a random order. Instead, items and events that were encountered at similar times tend to be recalled together, potentially reflecting the integration of a ‘temporal context’ signal in episodic memory. Though time appears to play an important role in episodic memory, there has been little work on whether selectively attending to specific moments in time impacts the degree to which temporal context contributes to episodic memory. In a new paper published in Memory & Cognition, Adam Broitman combined a target detection task with a verbal free recall paradigm and examined the impact of target detection on the order in which the words were recalled. Replicating the attentional boost effect, Adam found that words that were paired with a target during encoding were more likely to be subsequently recalled. He also found that target-paired words were more likely to be recalled first, suggesting increased accessibility during recall. However, there were no other effects of target detection on recall order. While temporal selection appears to facilitate encoding, these benefits do not extend to temporal context.
New paper on the effects of target detection on temporal context memory
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