The influence of context boundaries on memory for the sequential order of events

Episodic memory allows us to re-experience the past by recovering the sequences of events that characterize those prior experiences. Interestingly, although experience is continuous, we are able to selectively retrieve and re-experience more discrete episodes from our past, raising the possibility that some elements become tightly related to each other in memory, while others do not. The current series of experiments was designed to ask how shifts in context during an experience influence how we remember the past. Specifically, we asked how context shifts influence our ability to remember the relative order of past events, a hallmark of episodic memory. We found that memory for the order of events was enhanced within, as compared to across, context shifts, or ‘boundaries’ (Experiment 1). Next, we showed that this relative enhancement in order memory was eliminated when across-item associative processing was disrupted (Experiment 2), suggesting that context shifts have a selective effect on sequential binding. Finally, we provide evidence that the act of making order memory judgments involves the reactivation of representations that intervened, or bridged, the tested items (Experiment 3). Together, these data suggest that boundaries may serve to parse continuous experience into sequences of contextually related events and that this organization facilitates remembering the temporal order of events that share the same context.