Learned interval time facilitates associate memory retrieval

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.