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Related Experiment Video

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Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm

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Published on: April 28, 2016

Comprehending narratives containing flashbacks: evidence for temporally organized representations.

Berry Claus¹, Stephanie Kelter

¹Institute of Psychology, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany. clausb@rz.uni-potsdam.de

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition

|August 30, 2006

Summary

Readers mentally organize event sequences, even when narratives present events out of order. The perceived time elapsed between events impacts how easily earlier events are recalled, influencing narrative representation.

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Last Updated: Jul 20, 2026

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Psycholinguistics
Narrative Comprehension

Background:

Understanding how readers mentally represent event sequences is crucial for narrative comprehension.
Reader-constructed representations may differ from explicit text structures.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the temporal representations readers construct for narratives.
To determine if readers form temporal structures independent of textual order.

Main Methods:

Participants read narratives with events presented chronologically or non-chronologically (flashback).
Information about event duration was manipulated.
Mental accessibility of an earlier event (E1) was tested.

Main Results:

Event 1 (E1) was less accessible when implied to have occurred longer ago.
This effect persisted regardless of whether events were presented chronologically or non-chronologically.
Textual order did not solely dictate temporal representation.

Conclusions:

Readers actively construct temporally organized mental representations of narratives.
Temporal distance influences the accessibility of events in narrative memory.
Reader-driven temporal organization occurs even when text structure is non-chronological.