No abstract

Physical or conceptual boundaries segment continuous experience into component events. Boundaries accentuate differences between events that occur on either side of them, and reduce differences among events within them. Here we show that turns during navigation have the same effect on memory for routes as they do for episodes. Across three experiments, turns selectively enhanced participants' recollection of locations immediately preceding them. In addition, in Experiments 1 and 2, the presence of an intervening turn enhanced participants' ability to discriminate between event durations across boundaries, but impaired their ability to discriminate between their ordinal positions. In Experiment 3, the reported increase in recollection of pre-turn locations was also reflected in subjective dilation of the time spent at preturn, relative to post-turn, locations. Together, these results highlight the fundamental role of turns in the segmentation of spatial and temporal memory and indicate a potential mechanism for the segmentation of experience generally.