Working memory capacity for continuous events: an improved measure

Remembering the unfolding of past episodes usually takes less time than their actual duration. Recent work measuring the time required to mentally replay videos suggests that such temporal compression emerges when continuous events become too long to be fully held in working memory. However, in this previous research, the time needed to initiate the mental replay (i.e., to mentally visualize the starting point of events) was not taken into account. In the current study, we developed a corrected measure of remembering duration that controls for this initiation time to better characterize working memory capacity in representing continuous event. Using this corrected measure, we assessed the time needed by participants to mentally replay videos depicting continuous events (e.g., turning a car jack) lasting 3, 6, 9, 12, or 15 s. The results showed that events longer that 3-s were remembered in less time than their actual duration, suggesting that working memory is limited in its capacity to represent continuous events, leading to the emergence of temporal compression when they exceed 3 s. Exploratory analyses further revealed that faster mental replay tended to be judged less dynamic but not less clear, suggesting that the temporal compression of continuous events likely results from an incomplete remembering of event’s unfolding rather than a complete but imprecise mental replay.