Locating past and future: the influence of spatial ability on memory of items and time

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-06409-3

The representation of time depends heavily on spatial skills. Saj et al. (Psychological Science, 25(1), 207–214, 2014) established that left-hemispatial neglect leads to a selective deficit in remembering past items, i.e., the left side of mental timeline. The current study extends the line of research to neurotypical individuals to explore how individual differences in spatial ability affect the memory of items and temporal information associated with the items. In this study, 76 neurotypical participants completed (1) Saj et al.’s memory task (2014), where they learned and remembered lists of items a man liked (i.e., past items) or will like (i.e., future items), and (2) the measures of spatial ability (Mental Rotation Test and Line Estimation Task). Our findings indicate that higher spatial ability predicted better memory performance in both the recall and recognition tests for time. To conclude, our study is among the first to demonstrate how individual differences in spatial ability may impact time representation and memory that rely on a mental timeline. Future studies are encouraged to further explore the influence of individual differences on time representation.