Investigating cross-memory interactions of timing structures

Abstract

Motor and episodic memories are classically conceptualised as distinct memory domains. However, both memory sequences are characterised by order and timing of their elements. Generalisation has been previously documented between these different memories, with a shared ordinal structure facilitating learning. However, it is unclear whether this generalisation also applies to the timing structure of a sequence. In a between-subject design, healthy adults (N = 143) learned and reproduced motor and episodic memory sequences with either the same or different timing structures. Contrary to expectations, recall of an episodic timeline was poorer when preceded by learning a motor sequence with the same timing structure. Motor sequence reproduction was not affected by prior episodic encoding. The findings do not support the hypothesis of cross-domain generalisation of timing structure between episodic and motor memories. However, the observed interference may suggest some overlap in the mechanism encoding timing information between memory systems.