Association and context constitute two of the central ideas in the history of memory research. Following a brief discussion of the history of these ideas, I will review data that demonstrate the complementary roles of temporal contiguity and semantic relatedness in determining the order in which subjects recall items and the timing of their successive recalls. These analyses reveal that temporal contiguity effects persist over very long time scales, a result that challenges traditional psychological and neuroscientific models of association. The form of the temporal contiguity effect is conserved across all of the major recall tasks and even appears in item recognition when subjects respond with high confidence. The near-universal form of the contiguity effects and its appearance at diverse time scales is shown to place tight constraints on major theories of association. Howard & Kahana's (2002) temporal context model accounts for these phenomena by combining a mathematical model of contextual coding with a contextual retrieval mechanism. I will present a recent extension of TCM that uses a set of competitive leaky accumulators to explain the temporal dynamics of item retrieval, and I will discuss how this theory might be further tested using neuroscientific methods. |