Space and time are both essential aspects of human episodic memory. Yet, behavioral studies into the dynamics of recall have focused more on time than space. For instance, it is now well known that temporally contiguous events are more likely to be subsequently recalled than temporally remote events, as measured by the lag-conditional response probability (lag-CRP), which represents the probability of recalling item i + lag after recalling item i. The present study administered both verbal and spatial delayed free recall (DFR) tasks to a sample of 168 participants in order to measure lag-CRPs along both spatial and temporal associative dimensions. Whereas only the temporal lag-CRP could be measured in the verbal DFR task, both temporal and spatial lag-CRPs could be measured in the spatial DFR task. As expected, the results obtained in the verbal DFR task indicated the typical temporal contiguity effect. More importantly, the results obtained in the spatial DFR task indicated significant contiguity effects along both associative dimensions, and the spatial contiguity effect was found to be significantly larger than the temporal contiguity effect. In addition, the relatively small temporal contiguity effect observed in the spatial DFR task was also found to be significantly smaller than the temporal contiguity effect observed in the verbal DFR task. Altogether, the present findings provided novel evidence that spatial and temporal proximity can both cue sequential dependencies between successive recalls. As such, retrieved context models of episodic memory should be expanded to include spatial context as well as temporal context.

空间和时间都是人类情景记忆的重要方面。然而，关于回忆动态的行为研究更多地关注时间而不是空间。例如，现在众所周知，时间上连续的事件比时间上的远程事件更有可能被后续召回，这是由滞后条件响应概率 (lag-CRP) 衡量的，它表示召回项目i +滞后之后的概率回忆第i项. 本研究对 168 名参与者的样本进行了语言和空间延迟自由回忆 (DFR) 任务，以测量沿空间和时间关联维度的滞后 CRP。在语言 DFR 任务中只能测量时间滞后 CRP，而在空间 DFR 任务中可以测量时间和空间滞后 CRP。正如预期的那样，在口头 DFR 任务中获得的结果表明了典型的时间连续性效应。更重要的是，在空间 DFR 任务中获得的结果表明，沿两个关联维度都有显着的邻接效应，并且发现空间邻接效应显着大于时间邻接效应。此外，在空间 DFR 任务中观察到的相对较小的时间连续效应也被发现明显小于在语言 DFR 任务中观察到的时间连续效应。总而言之，目前的研究结果提供了新的证据，即空间和时间接近度都可以提示连续回忆之间的顺序依赖性。因此，检索情景记忆的上下文模型应该扩展到包括空间上下文和时间上下文。