Effects of order on memory of event times
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Discuss this preprint
Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?Listed in
- Evaluated articles (eLife)
Abstract
Memorizing time of an event may employ two processes (i) encoding of the absolute time of events within an episode, (ii) encoding of its relative order. Here we study interaction between these two processes. We performed experiments in which one or several items were presented, after which participants were asked to report the time of occurrence of items. When a single item was presented, the distribution of reported times was quite wide. When two or three items were presented, the relative order among them strongly affected the reported time of each of them. Bayesian theory that takes into account the memory for the events order is compatible with the experimental data, in particular in terms of the effect of order on absolute time reports. Our results suggest that people do not deduce order from memorized time, instead people’s memory for absolute time of events relies critically on memorized order of the events.
Article activity feed
-
Author Response:
Reviewer #1:
This manuscript reports the results of two timing experiments. The experimental paradigm asks participants to judge the time of target items in an unfilled interval between two landmark stimuli. In experiment 1, there is one item that must be judged. In experiment 2, there are two items to be judged. The basic empirical result is that relative order judgments in experiment 2 are more accurate than one might expect from the absolute timing judgments of experiment 1. A model is presented.
My overall reaction is that this paper does not present a sufficiently noteworthy empirical result. I can't imagine that there is a cognitive psychologist studying memory who would be surprised by the finding that relative order judgments in the second experiment are more accurate than one might expect from the absolute …
Author Response:
Reviewer #1:
This manuscript reports the results of two timing experiments. The experimental paradigm asks participants to judge the time of target items in an unfilled interval between two landmark stimuli. In experiment 1, there is one item that must be judged. In experiment 2, there are two items to be judged. The basic empirical result is that relative order judgments in experiment 2 are more accurate than one might expect from the absolute timing judgments of experiment 1. A model is presented.
My overall reaction is that this paper does not present a sufficiently noteworthy empirical result. I can't imagine that there is a cognitive psychologist studying memory who would be surprised by the finding that relative order judgments in the second experiment are more accurate than one might expect from the absolute judgments in experiment 1. On the encoding side, in these really short lists (with no secondary task), there is nothing preventing the participant from noting and encoding the order as the items are presented (not unlike the recursive reminding). On the retrieval side, we've known for a very long time that judgments of serial position use temporal landmarks (see for instance a series of remarkable studies by Hintzman and colleagues circa 1970).
Methodologically, this paper falls short of the standards one would expect for a cognitive psychology paper. There are basically no statistics or description of the distribution of the effect across participants. Although I'm pretty well-convinced that the basic finding (distributions in experiment 2 are different from experiment 1), I could not begin to guess at an effect size. The model is not seriously evaluated. The bimodal distributions are a large qualitative discrepancy that is not really discussed.
Although the title of the paper invites us to understand these results as telling us something about episodic memory, the empirical burden of this claim is not carried. Amnesia patients (and animals with hippocampal lesions) show relatively subtle differences in timing tasks. There is no evidence presented here, nor literature review, to convince the reader of this point.
Reviewer #1
We regret that the reviewer did not focus on the main results of the paper, and limited their remarks to just one analysis comparing the relative order precision to the one predicted from the naive assumption on independent absolute time judgements for each item. This analysis was done to confirm that relative order is quite precisely remembered for short lists that is indeed not surprising, but we still did it in order to get a quantitative estimate of ordering mistakes that we needed for our Bayesian experiments. Another purpose was to filter out the participants that don’t pay attention to the task (a common problem when performing experiments over the internet).
Regarding the title of the paper, we are not aware of similar experiments as ours done with amnesic patients. However we take the reviewer's point that the relation of our experiments to episodic memory as usually understood is not direct, so we took the word 'episodic' off the title in the revised version. We also added statistical analysis of the results.
Reviewer #2:
In this manuscript, the authors set out to measure participant's decisions about when an item occurred in a short list of 3 or 4 items, where the first and last items were always at the beginning and end, respectively. They report two behavioral studies that examine time judgments to items in the intermediate positions. They show that time judgments (when did you see X item using a continuous line scale) are always a little off but, more importantly, they tend to be anchored to other items presented. The results are interesting and add to our knowledge of the representation of time in the brain mainly by introducing a new paradigm with which to study time. Within the broader context of research on timing capacities, it should not be surprising that participants do not have a continuous representation of time that lasts beyond traditional time interval training of a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds. Furthermore, research has also shown that 'events' that require attentional resources do morph our perception and memory for time. So while the paradigm is worth expanding on, the behavioral results are not surprising given this past literature. I do feel however that this work is an important first step in developing a more firm model of memory for time.
Reviewer #2
Indeed, as mentioned above in response to Reviewer #1, we are not surprised that subjects don't remember well the absolute presentation time, especially when several items were involved. Exactly what they remember is the main point of this study, and the model is quite crucial in understanding what we believe is our novel result about how ordinal and absolute time representations interact in memory. The reviewer did not seem to appreciate this; rather they re-formulated our results as time judgments (when did you see X item using a continuous line scale) being 'anchored' to other items presented. We are not sure what this exactly means, probably that on average the difference between reported times of different items stayed almost constant for each presentation conditions. However our study not only presented this result but showed how it follows from the Bayesian theory.
-
Reviewer #2:
In this manuscript, the authors set out to measure participant's decisions about when an item occurred in a short list of 3 or 4 items, where the first and last items were always at the beginning and end, respectively. They report two behavioral studies that examine time judgments to items in the intermediate positions. They show that time judgments (when did you see X item using a continuous line scale) are always a little off but, more importantly, they tend to be anchored to other items presented. The results are interesting and add to our knowledge of the representation of time in the brain mainly by introducing a new paradigm with which to study time. Within the broader context of research on timing capacities, it should not be surprising that participants do not have a continuous representation of time that lasts …
Reviewer #2:
In this manuscript, the authors set out to measure participant's decisions about when an item occurred in a short list of 3 or 4 items, where the first and last items were always at the beginning and end, respectively. They report two behavioral studies that examine time judgments to items in the intermediate positions. They show that time judgments (when did you see X item using a continuous line scale) are always a little off but, more importantly, they tend to be anchored to other items presented. The results are interesting and add to our knowledge of the representation of time in the brain mainly by introducing a new paradigm with which to study time. Within the broader context of research on timing capacities, it should not be surprising that participants do not have a continuous representation of time that lasts beyond traditional time interval training of a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds. Furthermore, research has also shown that 'events' that require attentional resources do morph our perception and memory for time. So while the paradigm is worth expanding on, the behavioral results are not surprising given this past literature. I do feel however that this work is an important first step in developing a more firm model of memory for time.
-
Reviewer #1:
This manuscript reports the results of two timing experiments. The experimental paradigm asks participants to judge the time of target items in an unfilled interval between two landmark stimuli. In experiment 1, there is one item that must be judged. In experiment 2, there are two items to be judged. The basic empirical result is that relative order judgments in experiment 2 are more accurate than one might expect from the absolute timing judgments of experiment 1. A model is presented.
My overall reaction is that this paper does not present a sufficiently noteworthy empirical result. I can't imagine that there is a cognitive psychologist studying memory who would be surprised by the finding that relative order judgments in the second experiment are more accurate than one might expect from the absolute judgments in …
Reviewer #1:
This manuscript reports the results of two timing experiments. The experimental paradigm asks participants to judge the time of target items in an unfilled interval between two landmark stimuli. In experiment 1, there is one item that must be judged. In experiment 2, there are two items to be judged. The basic empirical result is that relative order judgments in experiment 2 are more accurate than one might expect from the absolute timing judgments of experiment 1. A model is presented.
My overall reaction is that this paper does not present a sufficiently noteworthy empirical result. I can't imagine that there is a cognitive psychologist studying memory who would be surprised by the finding that relative order judgments in the second experiment are more accurate than one might expect from the absolute judgments in experiment 1. On the encoding side, in these really short lists (with no secondary task), there is nothing preventing the participant from noting and encoding the order as the items are presented (not unlike the recursive reminding). On the retrieval side, we've known for a very long time that judgments of serial position use temporal landmarks (see for instance a series of remarkable studies by Hintzman and colleagues circa 1970).
Methodologically, this paper falls short of the standards one would expect for a cognitive psychology paper. There are basically no statistics or description of the distribution of the effect across participants. Although I'm pretty well-convinced that the basic finding (distributions in experiment 2 are different from experiment 1), I could not begin to guess at an effect size. The model is not seriously evaluated. The bimodal distributions are a large qualitative discrepancy that is not really discussed.
Although the title of the paper invites us to understand these results as telling us something about episodic memory, the empirical burden of this claim is not carried. Amnesia patients (and animals with hippocampal lesions) show relatively subtle differences in timing tasks. There is no evidence presented here, nor literature review, to convince the reader of this point.
-
