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Important real-life events temporally organize our memories and dilate remembered time

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Sarita Raghunath¹ (saritara@usc.edu), Wilma Bainbridge², Nina Rouhani¹; ¹University of Southern California, ²The University of Chicago

How well do people recall and temporally place the events of their own lives? We used participants’ posts from the 1 Second Everyday app, where they uploaded daily clips of their everyday lives spanning years of usage. Participants (N=50) first answered questions about 100 of their recorded memories, including when the event occurred as well as the emotionality, uniqueness, and memorability of the event. Then they ordered their memories on a timeline, using distance on the line to represent elapsed time between the posts. Finally, they provided information about important events that occurred during the time span of their app usage. When asking participants to identify memories, we found that higher emotional intensity, memorability, and uniqueness increased accuracy for when the post actually occurred. When placing their posts on a timeline, we found that if a significant life event had occurred between two posts, there was better ordering accuracy and increased temporal dilation. Our findings suggest that important life events organize our memories and dilate our subjective sense of time.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic