Recall Initiation Instructions Influence How Space and Time Interact in Memory

Recent work has examined, but still little is known about, how space and time interact during memory search. Here, we present the results of two experiments in which participants completed two immediate free recall tasks, a verbal task involving words presented at a central location and a spatial task involving squares presented at different locations. Some participants were allowed to recall the words or locations spontaneously in any order they wished. But critically, to assess the degree to which the influence of space and time are under cognitive control, other participants were subtly biased toward temporal information, with an instruction to begin recall from the last presented item before recalling the rest of the items in any order they wished. Replicating recent work, all conditions showed clear evidence that recall was organized along both the temporal and the spatial dimensions. Extending this work, we found that the subtle change of recall instructions increased the reliance on temporal information in the spatial recall task. A set of correlational analyses suggest that spatial and temporal information do not compete when participants search memory spontaneously but do compete when instructions favor temporal information. These findings expand our understanding of how associative dimensions interact in memory and provide an important target for future theoretical modeling.