Memory of where predicts confidence in when: the role of spatial information in dating autobiographical events

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do we know when a remembered event took place? Contemporary theories suggest that temporal landmarks, conventional time patterns, transitions, and lifetime periods, among other strategies, help reconstruct the date of an event. Spatial information plays a privileged role in participants’ experiences of reliving and vividness during remembering. Given its influence on these key properties, we conducted two experiments with undergraduate students (nStudy 1 = 151, nStudy 2 = 141) to test whether spatial information may also contribute uniquely to confidently dating a memory. Results from the two experiments revealed (1) higher levels of spatial details while remembering predicted greater confidence when dating memories and (2) spatial information is used to reconstruct dates of events by extending prior work that previously subsumed spatial information into the broader category of contextual details (e.g., Ben Malek et al., 2017). Participants utilised spatial information to date 26.6% of their memories; confirming previous work, they also utilised temporal landmarks, lifetime periods, and contextual details often to date events. Overall, spatial information is an important factor in dating autobiographical memories that had not been explored independently until this investigation. We discuss the implications for theories regarding the dating of memories and event memory.