Schedule of Events | Symposia

Memory Effects of Event Boundaries Caused by Spatial Change

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Lainey Costa¹ (laineyc@uoregon.edu), Troy Houser², J. Benjamin Hutchinson³, Dagmar Zeithamova⁴; ¹University of Oregon

Life is experienced continuously, but our memories are separated into distinct events. This is thought to result from spatial and temporal changes within our environment, experienced as event boundaries. Prior research on event segmentation showed increased errors in temporal order memory and subjective distance ratings for items experienced across context changes, but how contextual changes affect associative memory has received less attention. Here, subjects watched a controlled video of a person encountering objects while passing through several background environments that transitioned gradually. Afterward, temporal order memory and subjective temporal distance ratings were collected for pairs of objects. In addition to these typical measures, we tested associative memory by asking participants to pair an item to its spatial context. Results found no boundary effect on temporal order memory and a distance effect on perceived distance. However, there was reduced associative memory for items adjacent to the boundary. This contributes to our understanding of how context shifts affect memory representations.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic