Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is well-known that in free recall participants tend to recallwords presented close together in time in sequence, reflectinga form of temporal binding in memory. This contiguity effectis robust, having been observed across many different experi-mental manipulations. In order to explore a potential boundaryon the contiguity effect, participants performed a free recalltask in which items were presented at rates ranging from 2 Hzto 8 Hz. Participants were still able to recall items even atthe fastest presentation rate, though accuracy decreased. Im-portantly, the contiguity effect flattened as presentation ratesincreased. These findings illuminate possible constraints onthe temporal encoding of episodic memories.