The ties that bind: Effects of narrative coherence on recall performance and organization

Memories of experiences are often tied together, where remembering one experience can spark memories of others. One may link temporally distant events based on their meaning or recall closely occurring events together. Linking based on temporal organization has been studied in simple list-learning paradigms, but less is known about how these effects manifest in real-life experiences. Here, we investigate how meaningful connections in a lifelike narrative interact with temporal context to influence recall success and organization. Participants encoded picture stories featuring multiple subplots, some of which connected across time (Coherent Narratives), while others did not (Unrelated Narratives). Across experiments using character-cued (N=39 and N=36) and free recall (N=39) tasks, Coherent Narratives were better recalled than Unrelated Narratives, regardless of temporal distance between events. Additionally, temporally separated Coherent Narrative event pairs tended to be recalled contiguously, suggesting that people bound memories based on meaningful connections, not just based on temporal structure.