Dopaminergic processes predict temporal distortions in event memory

Abstract Our memories do not simply keep time — they distort it, stretching and compressing the past to reflect the structure of experience. Here, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI; n = 32) with eye-tracking (n = 28) to test whether activation of the dopaminergic system, known to influence encoding and time perception, expands mnemonic representations of time between contextually distinct events. Participants encoded item sequences while listening to tones that typically repeated over time, but occasionally changed, creating salient event boundaries. We found that tone switches significantly activated the ventral tegmental area (VTA), and the magnitude of these responses predicted greater time dilation between item pairs spanning those switches. At a longer timescale, increased blinking also predicted greater time dilation in memory, but only for boundary-spanning item pairs. Together, these findings suggest that dopaminergic processes are sensitive to event structure and contribute to distortions of remembered time that may help segment continuous experience into distinct episodic memories.