Schedule of Events | Symposia

Motor-based versus declarative memory of multiple durations

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

Abigail Y. Liu¹ (abliu@u.northwestern.edu), Kezhen Qi¹, Marcia Grabowecky¹, Satoru Suzuki¹; ¹Northwestern University

While time flows continuously, we often perceive and recall it as discrete segments of events with associated durations. We investigated how encoding and retrieval contexts influenced the memory of event durations. Participants encoded the durations of four, eight, or twelve visually presented words lasting 300-5000ms (log spaced) by immediately reproducing the duration of each word in four blocks. To facilitate comparisons across the memory set sizes, four medium-duration words were included in all word sets. The motor-based memory of durations was tested by having participants reproduce the duration of each remembered word. The declarative memory of durations was then tested by asking participants to choose the longer duration between each pair of the remembered words. Then motor-based memory was tested again. While the motor-based memory was equivalent across memory set sizes, declarative memory was degraded for the twelve-word set. Adding an auditory context (a generated voice speaking at an appropriate speed to match its duration) improved motor-based memory, but did not affect declarative memory. Further, declarative memory was substantially worse than predicted by the motor-based memory performance obtained before or after the declarative memory test; that is, even when participants accurately reproduced A as longer than B in the motor memory task, they often reported B as longer than A in the pairwise comparison task. These dissociations suggest that, although duration reproduction is an explicit task, the underlying motor-based memory of durations does not transfer to declarative memory to facilitate comparison of events based on their durations.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic