“A long time ago, in a context far, far away”: Retrospective time estimates and internal context change.

This investigation aimed to establish retrospective time judgments as markers of internal context change across 2 memory paradigms, the effects of which have been attributed to internal context change by some researchers. Experiment 1 involved the list-method directed forgetting paradigm and established that the forget group significantly overestimated the duration of the experiment compared with the remember group. Experiment 2 involved the list-before-last paradigm, whereby participants studied 3 lists, and in between encoding of List 2 and List 3, some participants retrieved List 1, whereas the control participants restudied List 1. The results showed that the retrieval group significantly overestimated the duration of the experiment compared with the restudy group. Overall, these results support the context-change interpretation of these paradigms, and they also support the contextual-change hypothesis of retrospective timing (Block & Reed, 1978).