Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 143, October 2015, Pages 193-202
Cognition

In search of lost time: Reconstructing the unfolding of events from memory

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.06.014Get rights and content

Abstract

When remembering an event, not only do we recollect what happened, when and where it happened, but also how it unfolded over time. What aspects of events are encoded in memory to support this recollection? This question is central for understanding the nature of event memories and our reconstruction of the time passed. In this article, we investigate how the spontaneous encoding of unfamiliar animations during learning influences the recollection of how these animations unfold. Specifically, we examine two structural properties of dynamic event sequences known to modulate the amount of information encoded in memory: the perceived number of sub-events and their perceived similarity. We found that despite clock duration remaining constant, more sub-events and less similar ones led to longer recognition memory latencies, duration judgments and mental event replaying. In particular, across stimulus animations, both the perceived number of sub-events and their degree of similarity contributed to the prediction of duration judgments and the length of mental event reproductions. Results indicate that the number and nature of sub-events in a sequence modulate how we reconstruct its duration and temporal unfolding, thus suggesting that these event properties, which mediate the amount of information encoded for an event, modulate the subsequent recollection of its temporal unfolding.

Section snippets

Experiment 1: Recognition memory and retrospective scalar duration judgment

In this experiment, we investigate whether recognition memory and scalar duration judgments are modulated by the perceived segmental and similarity structure of the remembered stimuli. To this end, we created a set of animations that varied in event structure properties (Fig. 1) and asked a set of independent participants to judge both the number of segments and their similarity. These judgments confirmed our intuitions that the basic and the dissimilar conditions differed in both number of

Experiment 2: Recognition memory and mental reproduction of events

In this experiment, we used the same stimuli and learning paradigm as in Experiment 1. We also used the same recognition memory task to attempt to replicate our previous results. Importantly, to probe the memory representations extracted from the animations, and in particular, the representation of their temporal unfolding, we asked participants to mentally replay the animations exactly as they have experienced them in their original time course. This task was triggered by the presentation of

General discussion

Overall, our results suggest that for a given animation, its sub-event and similarity structure modulates how we remember or reconstruct the event’s temporal unfolding: more sub-events and less similar ones led to longer recognition latencies, duration attributions and mental reproductions. Moreover, the number of sub-events and their similarity accounted for orthogonal portions of variance across items, suggesting separate contributions of each event property. Although our memory-based

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