Turns during navigation act as boundaries that enhance spatial memory and expand time estimation

Abstract Ongoing experience unfolds over time. To segment continuous experience into component events, humans rely on physical and conceptual boundaries. Here we explored the subjective representation of turns along travelled routes as boundaries. Across two experiments, turns selectively enhanced participants’ subjective recollection of locations immediately preceding them, compared to their recollection of locations in the middle of a route straightaway or immediately following turns. In Experiment 2, we also observed a subjective expansion of the time spent at pre-turn, relative to post-turn, locations. These results highlight the influence of turns on memory for travelled routes and provide further evidence for a link between subjective episodic re-experiencing and temporal memory. Taken together, this evidence suggests that turns during navigation act much as boundaries do for events, enhancing memory and processing of pre-boundary locations.