Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Department of Psychology, UC Davis, Davis, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Nov 8;13(11):e0206999. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0206999. eCollection 2018.
Episodic memory is a critical capacity that involves remembering past events along with their spatial and temporal contexts. Relatively little is known about the relations between spatial and temporal information in long-term memory in children or adults. The present research examined the influence of the mental timeline (linear horizontal display extending from the left to right direction for English speakers) on memory for events and their spatial and temporal features in 7-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds and young adults (N = 146). During encoding, participants studied triplets of objects, varying on two dimensions of the mental timeline: linearity (whether objects were presented in linear succession or not) and direction (whether objects were presented from left-to-right or right-to-left). After a delay, during retrieval, participants were tested on their memory for individual objects, and either the spatial location or temporal order of the objects. We found that overall accuracy for spatial location was higher than accuracy for temporal order, and there was a parallel developmental trajectory for both these aspects of memory. Across age groups we found that memory for temporal order, but not spatial location, was influenced by linearity and direction (i.e., match to mental timeline). Thus, in both children and adults the spatiotemporal mental timeline supported memory for temporal order, converging with predictions generated within domains of language and thought and enhancing our understanding of how space and time are represented in the mind.
情景记忆是一种重要的能力，涉及到记忆过去的事件及其空间和时间背景。关于儿童或成人长期记忆中空间和时间信息之间的关系，我们知之甚少。本研究考察了心理时间线（对于英语使用者来说是从左到右线性水平显示）对 7 岁、9 岁、11 岁和年轻成年人（N=146）对事件及其空间和时间特征的记忆的影响。在编码过程中，参与者研究了三物体组，这些物体在心理时间线的两个维度上变化：线性（物体是否按线性顺序呈现）和方向（物体是从左到右还是从右到左呈现）。在延迟后，在检索过程中，参与者会接受对单个物体的记忆测试，以及物体的空间位置或时间顺序。我们发现，空间位置的整体准确性高于时间顺序的准确性，并且这两个记忆方面都有平行的发展轨迹。在所有年龄组中，我们发现时间顺序的记忆，而不是空间位置的记忆，受到线性和方向的影响（即与心理时间线匹配）。因此，在儿童和成人中，时空心理时间线都支持时间顺序的记忆，这与语言和思维领域内的预测一致，并增强了我们对空间和时间在头脑中是如何表示的理解。
