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Mnemicity versus temporality: Distinguishing between components of episodic representations - PubMed

. 2022 Oct;151(10):2448-2465.

doi: 10.1037/xge0001215. Epub 2022 Mar 24.

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Mnemicity versus temporality: Distinguishing between components of episodic representations

Johannes B Mahr et al. J Exp Psychol Gen. 2022 Oct.

Abstract

Human beings regularly "mentally travel" to past and future times in memory and imagination. In theory, whether an event is remembered or imagined (its "mnemicity") underspecifies whether it is oriented toward the past or the future (its "temporality"). However, it remains unclear to what extent the temporal orientation of such episodic simulations is cognitively represented separately from their status as memory or imagination. To address this question, we investigated to what extent episodic simulations are distinguishable in recall by virtue of both temporal orientation and mnemicity. In three experiments (N = 360), participants were asked to generate and later recall events differing along the lines of temporal orientation (past/future) and mnemicity (remembered/imagined). Across all of our experiments, we found that mnemicity and temporality each contributed to participants' ability to discriminate different types of event simulations in recall. However, participants were also consistently more likely to confuse in recall event simulations that shared the same temporal orientation rather than the same mnemicity. These results show that the temporal orientation of episodic simulations can be cognitively represented separately from their mnemicity and have implications for debates about the structure of episodic representations as well as the role of temporality in this structure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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Conflict of interest statement

We have no conflict of interest to declare.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:

Outline of the procedure of Experiment 1. In the first part of the experiment, participants completed a Simulation Encoding Task in which they were asked to generate and describe remembered, imagined past, or imagined future events related to an object word cue. Participants were also asked to rate each event for difficulty, amount of perceptual detail, familiarity, and emotional intensity. In the second part of the experiment, (Simulation Retrieval Task), participants were presented again with each cue word and asked to recall what type of event they had generated for that cue in part 1.

Figure 2:
Figure 2:

Possible representations resulting from combining differences in temporality (past/future) and mnemicity (remembered/imagined). While Experiments 1 and 2, only included Remembered Past, Imagined Past (i.e. counterfactual), and Imagined Future events, Experiment 3 also included “Remembered” Future (i.e. Recast) events.

Figure 3:
Figure 3:

Error types differentiating between the role of temporality and mnemicity in the distinctiveness of different kinds of episodic simulations. Mnemicity Errors (i.e. confusions between remembered past and imagined past events) indicate successful retention of temporality (since these events share the same temporal orientation). In contrast, Temporality Errors (i.e. confusions between imagined past and imagined future events) indicate successful retention of Mnemicity (since these events are both imagined). Mnemicity + Temporality Errors (i.e. confusions between remembered and imagined future events indicate retention of neither mnemicity nor temporality since these events share neither mnemicity nor temporal orientation).

Figure 4:
Figure 4:

Recall performance (proportion of correct responses) in the Simulation Retrieval Task in each event type condition in Experiments 1 and 2. Scatter plots depict proportions for each participant. Boxplot middle bars represent medians, upper and lower hinges correspond to the first and third quartiles (i.e. 25th and 75th percentiles), and whiskers extend from the hinge to the largest value no further than 1.5 * IQR from the hinge in either direction (where IQR is the inter-quartile range/the distance between the first and third quartiles).

Figure 5:
Figure 5:

Distribution of different responses in the Simulation Retrieval Task in each event type condition across participants in Experiments 1 and 2.

Figure 6:
Figure 6:

Proportions of Mnemicity, Temporality, and Mnemicity + Temporality Errors in the Simulation Retrieval Task of Experiments 1 and 2. In both experiments, participants committed significantly more Mnemicity than Temporality Errors, and more Temporality than Mnemicity + Temporality Errors.

Figure 7:
Figure 7:

Updated error matrix for Mnemicity, Temporality, and Mnemicity + Temporality Errors after the addition of recast/”remembered future” events. Confusions between recast and imagined future events are categorized as Mnemicity Errors, while confusions between recast and remembered events are categorized as Temporality Errors.

Figure 8:
Figure 8:. A:

Recall accuracy (proportion of correct responses) in each event type condition in Experiment 3. B: Proportion of different memory responses in each event type condition of Experiment 3.

Figure 9:
Figure 9:

Distribution of error proportions across different error types in Experiment 3. Confusions between recast and imagined future events were coded as Mnemicity Errors whereas confusions between recast and remembered events were coded as Temporality Errors.

Figure 10:
Figure 10:

Absolute mean difference scores in event ratings for differences in Mnemicity and Temporality in Experiment 3. Detail and familiarity ratings differed more strongly across remembered (remembered + recast) and imagined (imagined past + future) events than across past (remembered + imagined past) and future (imagined future + recast) events. Differences in difficulty and emotionality ratings did not differentiate between event mnemicity and temporality.

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