Organizational dynamics of memory across days.

When individuals repeatedly study and recall information across multiple learning trials, their responses exhibit increasing levels of subjective organization. Whereas classic studies investigated the evolution of organization across lists within the short-time span of a single session, here, we ask how memory changes over many days. Specifically, we examine how semantic, temporal, and subjective organization during a recall period shapes memory after days of intervening cognitive activity. Analyzing data from two multisession free-recall experiments, we find that subjects demonstrate a strong tendency to cluster recalls based on previous output order, with this effect strengthening across sessions. In line with the idea that thoughts become memories, we show that even false memories produced on a given session tend to reoccur on subsequent days. Our results attest to the crucial role that retrieval plays in shaping long-term episodic memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).