Searching for Linearity: Reconstructive Processes Reverse Temporal Scrambling in Memory for Movie Scenes

Meaning-making and temporal memory are closely intertwined, yet we still do not know how the overall understanding of complex events affects retrospective temporal judgments. The present study investigated the effect of a manipulation of the temporal linearity of a narrative on the subsequent memory-for-time performance. Participants indicated the time of occurrence of short video clips extracted from a previously encoded movie on a horizontal timeline representing the movie duration. Importantly, a group of participants (N = 20) watched the original movie, which depicts events occurring in chronological order, whereas another group (N = 30) watched a scrambled version of the same movie in which the temporal linearity was lost. This procedure allowed us to measure the quantity and direction of the temporal memory bias. The scrambled presentation produced a mild and general impairment of recognition memory compared to the linear presentation. More importantly, it biased temporal judgments as a function of the direction and amount of discrepancy between the story and the viewing time, in accordance with an automatic reshaping of temporal memory caused by a chronological representation of the storyline. This effect could be distinguished from a tendency to move judgments toward the center of the timeline, independently from the specific scrambling arrangement, consistent with the idea that the non-linearity of the story also generally increased the degree of temporal uncertainty. Taken together, our results provide further evidence that temporal memories are automatically reconstructed according to the general meaning of the events.