Development of memory linking supports precise temporal inference

Determining when a past event occurred often requires inferring connections between related experiences rather than recalling a directly observed event time. While prior studies demonstrate that even children draw on temporal knowledge about familiar routines to infer retrospectively when events likely occurred, we know less about the learning mechanisms that support formation of such temporal knowledge and how those mechanisms develop and underlie gains in temporal inference. Here, 104 participants aged 7–25 years completed a temporal memory task in which participants repeatedly viewed four event sequences (“days”) comprising five unique events. Clock cues were presented between each event within a sequence, with those cues varying across sequence repetition. Thus, to learn the precise times of events, participants needed to encode the clock cue information and update it across sequence repetitions to infer the precise time of an individual event. We found that while order memory for events within a sequence reached adult-like levels in early adolescence, the ability to infer precise event times from the clock cues continued to mature into adulthood. Moreover, when clock cues were more variable and uncertain across repetitions, children and adolescents showed less precise temporal inferences that were biased toward the average times of events that shared a sequence position across the four “days”. Together, these findings indicate that developmental improvements in memory linking, wherein information is updated and combined across multiple episodic experiences, drive age-related gains in the precision with which individuals infer the precise timing of events.