The disintegration of event files over time: Decay or interference?

When facing particular combinations of stimuli and responses, people create temporary event files integrating the corresponding stimulus and response features. Repeating one or more of these features retrieves the entire event file, which impairs performance if not all features repeat (partial-repetition costs). We studied how durable event files are over time and how sensitive they are to intervening objects or stimulus-response events. After-effects of relevant and irrelevant stimulus-response bindings were assessed after intervals of 1 to 5 s between creation and retrieval of the binding that were either unfilled (Experiment 1A), filled with 0, 2, or 4 presentations of the same neutral stimulus (1B), or of changing stimuli (1C), or filled with 0, 2, or 4 task-unrelated stimulus-response combinations (2A) or the same number of repetitions of the binding-inducing stimulus-response combination (2B). Taken altogether, the findings show a strong impact on the duration of the interval but no systematic effect of the type and number of intervening events. This suggests that event files disintegrate over time, as a function of spontaneous decay, but not due to interference from other bindings. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.3758/s13423-020-01738-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.