The role of reminding in long-term memory for temporal order
Order codes are one of the three main types of information that have been hypothesized to underlie memory for the times of life events. Published evidence for the theory, however, has come exclusively from research in which brief retention intervals have been used. In the first of two studies, 101 adults judged the order of pairs of movies released 5–14 years ago, half of which shared a common major actor. There was no evidence that related films could be ordered more accurately than unrelated ones. In the second study, 88 students were presented with in-class announcements that were either related or unrelated to an earlier announcement. Three weeks later, they judged the order of the pairs of announcements. There was no difference between the accuracy for the related and the unrelated pairs. The findings do not support the proposal that the automatic creation of order information at the time of encoding contributes to autobiographical memory. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 0241558. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Friedman, William J. 2007. "The role of reminding in long-term memory for temporal order." Memory & Cognition 35(1): 66-72.
Memory & Cognition