In search of lost time: Reconstructing the unfolding of events from memory
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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2022, CognitionProspective and retrospective timing in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis
2021, Behavioural Brain ResearchCitation Excerpt :The higher the number of contextual changes encoded during the time period, the longer the remembered duration is. Types of stimulus and task difficulty seem instead to have little or no influence on retrospective temporal judgements [65–68]. Two brain structures have been shown to be involved in retrospective timing: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the medial temporal lobes [69,70].
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