Is “memory-for-when” universal? Group and individual variability in temporal position memory for words, faces, and classrooms

ABSTRACT

Many contemporary theories of memory assume that everyone automatically stores temporal contextual information about all types of encountered information, yet most studies on this topic have used words and ignored individual differences. Five experiments accumulated evidence that explicit storage of temporal context information does not appear to occur automatically for all people and types of memoranda. We collected judgments of temporal position (memory-for-when) for words (Experiments 1 & 3), faces (Experiments 2A, 3, 4, and 5), and classrooms (Experiments 2B & 3). At the group level, for each of these memoranda memory-for-when was sensitive to the original input position and showed a temporal primacy effect reflecting better memory for position for items near the beginning of the list, indicating some automatic storage of temporal context information. However, memory-for-when was significantly better for words than classrooms, with faces in the middle. Moreover, individuals varied dramatically in their ability to indicate memory-for-when, especially for classrooms where many people performed at or near chance. Taken together, the data suggest that explicit memory-for-when may be dissociable from the more implicit use of temporal contextual information that is theorised to occur during free recall.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory-for-when
• memory for time
• temporal context
• face memory
• place memory

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://osf.io/fk84n/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Statement of contributions

Peter Delaney was responsible for the final analyses and drafted the manuscript. Peter Delaney and Todd Jones formulated the original idea for the series of studies. However, all four authors contributed ideas for the studies and edited parts of the manuscript. Todd Jones wrote the software used to conduct all of the original in-lab studies, including Experiment 5; Peter Delaney wrote the Qualtrics program for Experiment 3 based on Jones’ program. Agustin de Leon selected the stimuli and conducted Experiments 1, 2A, and 5. Myranda Cook selected the stimuli and conducted Experiments 2B and 4. Peter Delaney conducted Experiment 3. Both Agustin de Leon and Myranda Cook were involved in coding data and performing data analyses.

Notes

1 The untransformed values and the transformed values with standard deviations are all available in the dataset, if needed.