Narrative coherence bends the arrow of time when recalling naturalistic events

How are our everyday memories structured? Standard laboratory paradigms such as list-learning tasks have shown that recall clusters based on temporal context and semantic relationships between items. Understanding whether these phenomena manifest in daily life—a realm often characterized by narrative threads of interconnected experiences—has only recently become a focus among memory researchers. Here, we investigate how time and narrative coherence influence the organization of recall, as well as memory for the timing of naturalistic experiences. Participants encoded picturebook-style stories that included multiple side plots. Some of these connected across time to form a single overarching narrative (Coherent Narratives) while others did not (Unrelated Narratives). We systematically varied the number of intervening events between connected narrative elements. Across three experiments using multiple recall tasks, Coherent Narratives were consistently better remembered than Unrelated Narratives. Critically, this narrative coherence benefit occurred regardless of the temporal distance between connected events. Narrative coherence did not directly influence memory for temporal location or distance but distorted the temporal organization of events during free recall: meaningfully connected events were recalled closer together than they appeared in the story. These findings reveal that people leverage meaningful connections between events when constructing memories from naturalistic experiences, affecting what is recalled and in what order.