The modulation and elimination of temporal organization in free recall

Experiences occur in a continual succession, and the temporal structure of those experiences is often preserved in memory. The temporal contiguity effect of free recall reveals the temporal structure of memory: when a particular item is remembered, the next response is likely to come from a nearby list position. This effect is remarkably robust, appearing across a wide variety of methodological variations of the task. The temporal contiguity effect is also central to retrieved-context models, which propose temporal organization arises from the interaction of a temporal context representation with the contents of memory. Across six experiments, we demonstrate methodological manipulations that dramatically modulate and even eliminate temporal organization in free recall. We find that temporal organization is strongly modulated and in some cases potentially eliminated by strong semantic structure, the presence of retrieval practice, and a long list length. Other factors such as orienting task, paired-associate item structure, and retention interval duration have more subtle effects on temporal organization. In an accompanying set of simulations, we show that the modulation and elimination of the temporal organization follows lawful patterns predicted by the context maintenance and retrieval (CMR) retrieved-context model. We also find cases where CMR does not specifically predict the modulation of temporal organization, and in these cases our analysis suggests how the theory might be developed to account for these effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).