Is memory organized by temporal contiguity?

Abstract

The hypotheses that memories are ordered according to time and that contiguity is central to learning have recently reemerged in the human memory literature. This article reviews some of the key empirical findings behind this revival and some of the evidence against it, and finds the evidence for temporal organization unconvincing. A central problem is that, as many memory experiments are done, they have a prospective, as well as a retrospective, component. That is, if subjects can anticipate how they will be tested, they encode the to-be-remembered material in a way that they believe will facilitate performance on the anticipated test. Experiments that avoid this confounding factor have shown little or no evidence of organization by contiguity.