Organisation of event files–can temporal factors influence stimulus–response binding and retrieval?

Abstract This paper explores how temporal factors, that is, veridical time intervals and symbolic (adverbial) references to time derived from event segmentation theory, influence the retrieval of common stimulus and response representations, so called event files . In a series of four experiments, we examined temporal factors in their role for event file retrieval by implementing time intervals (Experiment 1, N = 64), temporal adverbials (Experiment 3, N = 70), and a combination of both (Experiment 4, N = 74). Specifically, we introduced a temporal manipulation between event file binding and retrieval—that is, between the sequential presentations—to investigate whether the likelihood of event file retrieval is reduced after long intervals or adverbials referring to a long period. Experiment 1 showed that long time intervals reduced the after-effects of S-R binding. In Experiment 2 ( N = 71), we confirmed that the temporal adverbials used in Experiments 3 and 4 are generally capable of inducing subjective event boundaries when segmentation is task-relevant as in a typical event segmentation task. However, we did not find any effects suggesting that the mere semantic reference to time intervals in Experiment 3 has the same effect as veridical (i.e. physical) time intervals. This also held for semantic reference to time intervals that have been associated with actual time intervals (Experiment 4). Thus, the findings are more consistent with an interpretation of decay, in which the passage of veridical time gradually weakens the strength of the memory trace representing an event file, than with event segmentation, in which symbolic temporal information should induce an event boundary and thereby reduce the likelihood of retrieval.