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Tempo-Evoked Arousal: Distortions of Temporal Memory and Temporal Expansion

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 3 - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm PST, Salon E.

Mikaila Tombe¹, Caroline Palmer¹, Signy Sheldon²; ¹McGill University

Arousing events hold privilege within our memory; however, the precise nature of this privilege is not clear. A key component of event memory is the ability to successfully recall the order in which details occurred, leading researchers to investigate how arousal impacts temporal order memory during arousing and non-arousing events. While this work has shown that events which are inherently arousing are recalled with more accurate temporal memory, it is unclear if this pattern holds when arousal is not inherent within an event. To address this question, we conducted a within-subjects behavioural experiment in which participants encoded four videos depicting neutral events that were paired with either highly arousing or non-arousing musical excerpts. After a short delay, participants were shown pairs of still images from the movies and were asked to make a temporal order judgment (which image came first?), as well as duration estimation (how much time between?). Participants were less accurate on the temporal order judgement task for images from events encoded with arousing music. Music also impacts the duration estimation task, such as arousing music led to temporal expansion distortions compared to low arousing music. This expansion of time was also found when estimates of the entire event were compared across arousal conditions. We interpret these results as indicating that when arousal is not inherent to an event, it can have a harmful effect on memory, contrasting existing literature that promotes an arousal benefit to memory when arousal is engrained in the encoding of an event.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic