Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An influential mathematical model of memory, the temporal context model (TCM), posits that we encode items and their associations with temporal context (Howard & Kahana, 2002). Temporal context is conceived of as a recency-weighted av- erage of past experiences. Critically, the model assumes that when an item is retrieved later, the associated temporal con- text is also obligatorily retrieved. Existing evidence for the idea of retrieved temporal context primarily comes from free- recall studies. However, free recall introduces some critical confounds that are difficult to resolve (Folkerts et al., 2018) and also encourages memory strategies that may mimic tem- poral context effects (Hintzman, 2011). To address these con- founds, we investigate temporal context using an image recog- nition task. Schwartz et al. (2005) examined temporal con- text in an image recognition task using a short-list-based ex- perimental design, and found that temporal context influenced recognition performance. Building on this, we use the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) to show that reinstating temporal con- text enhances recognition accuracy even across substantially longer timescales. We demonstrate that images that were tem- porally closer during encoding facilitated the recognition of each other. Critically, we show that this influence falls off with temporal distance at encoding only when the temporal context is successfully retrieved, as predicted by TCM. Furthermore, the slope of this temporal gradient increases as a function of the strength of the influence of the retrieved temporal context. These findings extend our understanding of temporal context effects in episodic memory by showing that temporal context is retrieved even in tasks that do not encourage linking between items as a memory strategy.