Learned interval time facilitates associate memory retrieval
- Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht 6200 MD, The Netherlands
- Corresponding author: v.vandeven{at}maastrichtuniversity.nl
Abstract
The extent to which time is represented in memory remains underinvestigated. We designed a time paired associate task (TPAT) in which participants implicitly learned cue–time–target associations between cue–target pairs and specific cue–target intervals. During subsequent memory testing, participants showed increased accuracy of identifying matching cue–target pairs if the time interval during testing matched the implicitly learned interval. A control experiment showed that participants had no explicit knowledge about the cue–time associations. We suggest that “elapsed time” can act as a temporal mnemonic associate that can facilitate retrieval of events associated in memory.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.044404.116.
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Freely available online through the Learning & Memory Open Access option.
- Received September 30, 2016.
- Accepted February 7, 2017.
This article, published in Learning & Memory, is available under a Creative Commons License (Attribution 4.0 International), as described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
