Department of Neuroscience, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Nat Commun. 2022 Feb 2;13(1):622. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-28216-9.
In memory, our continuous experiences are broken up into discrete events. Boundaries between events are known to influence the temporal organization of memory. However, how and through which mechanism event boundaries shape temporal order memory (TOM) remains unknown. Across four experiments, we show that event boundaries exert a dual role: improving TOM for items within an event and impairing TOM for items across events. Decreasing event length in a list enhances TOM, but only for items at earlier local event positions, an effect we term the local primacy effect. A computational model, in which items are associated to a temporal context signal that drifts over time but resets at boundaries captures all behavioural results. Our findings provide a unified algorithmic mechanism for understanding how and why event boundaries affect TOM, reconciling a long-standing paradox of why both contextual similarity and dissimilarity promote TOM.
在记忆中，我们的连续经验被分割成离散的事件。事件之间的边界被认为会影响记忆的时间组织。然而，事件边界如何以及通过什么机制来塑造时间顺序记忆（TOM）仍然未知。在四项实验中，我们表明事件边界具有双重作用：改善事件内项目的 TOM，损害跨事件项目的 TOM。在列表中减少事件长度会增强 TOM，但仅适用于较早的局部事件位置，我们称之为局部优先效应。一个计算模型，其中项目与随时间漂移但在边界处重置的时间上下文信号相关联，捕获了所有行为结果。我们的发现为理解事件边界如何以及为何影响 TOM 提供了一个统一的算法机制，调和了为什么上下文相似性和相异性都促进 TOM 的长期悖论。
