Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One aspect of context on cognition and memory that has been understudied is the influence of temporal context. The temporal contexts used in this study were different times of the year. More specifically, given that we were dealing with a largely Roman Catholic population, we operationalized temporal context in terms of two religious seasons, Lent and Ordinary Time. For this study, we assessed experience of, and memory for, representational and abstract art as a function of whether there was temporal congruity or incongruity. Temporal context did influence memory for perceptual details but not the experience of art during viewing, or gist and autobiographical memory. Thus, temporal context can influence cognition, but the scope of this influence is limited.