Conversational Time Travel: Evidence of a Retrospective Bias in Real Life Conversations

Abstract

We examined mental time travel reflected onto individuals’ utterances in real-life conversations using a naturalistic observation method: Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR, a portable audio recorder that periodically and unobtrusively records snippets of ambient sounds and speech). We introduced the term conversational time travel and examined, for the first time, how much individuals talked about their personal past versus personal future in real life. Study 1 included 9,010 sound files collected from 51 American adults who carried the EAR over 1 weekend and were recorded every 9 min for 50 s. Study 2 included 23,103 sound files from 33 young and 48 healthy older adults from Switzerland who carried the EAR for 4 days (2 weekdays and 1 weekend, counterbalanced). 30-s recordings occurred randomly throughout the day. We developed a new coding scheme for conversational time travel: We listened to all sound files and coded each file for whether the participant was talking or not. Those sound files that included participant speech were also coded in terms of their temporal focus (e.g., past, future, present, time-independent) and autobiographical nature (i.e., about the self, about others). We, first, validated our coding scheme using the text analysis tool, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Next, we compared the percentages of past- and future-oriented utterances about the self (to tap onto conversational time travel). Results were consistent across all samples and showed that participants talked about their personal past two to three times as much as their personal future (i.e., retrospective bias). This is in contrast to research showing a prospective bias in thinking behavior, based on self-report and experience-sampling methods. Findings are discussed in relation to the social functions of recalling the personal past (e.g., sharing memories to bond with others, to update each other, to teach, to give advice) and to the directive functions of future-oriented thought (e.g., planning, decision making, goal setting that are more likely to happen privately in the mind). In sum, the retrospective bias in conversational time travel seems to be a functional and universal phenomenon across persons and across real-life situations.

Best practices for Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) research: A practical guide to coding and processing EAR data

“…Initially considered a somewhat esoteric "niche-method", it has over the years methodologically matured into a psychometrically established and broadly used ecological assessment method. To date, the EAR method has been successfully employed, with good acceptance and compliance, in a range of healthy and clinical populations (Baddeley Pennebaker & Beevers, 2013;Brown, Tragesser, Tomko, Mehl & Trull, 2014;Hasselmo et al, 2018;Holleran, Whitehead, Schmader & Mehl, 2011;Minor et al 2018;Robbins et al, 2018;Slatcher & Robles, 2012;Tobin et al, 2015) and in age groups ranging from early childhood to A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO CODING AND PROCESSING EAR DATA 4 old age (Alisic, Barrett, Bowles, Conroy & Mehl, 2015;Bollich et al, 2016;Demiray & Martin, 2018).…”

Eavesdropping on autobiographical memory: A naturalistic observation study of older adults' memory sharing in daily conversations

“…Prior laboratorybased research has extensively studied how the sharing of autobiographical memories appears to change with older age, with one key finding being that there is a robust age-related reduction in episodic memories that is evident in both the frequency at which such memories are retrieved (Ford et al, 2014;Piolino et al, 2006;Ros et al, 2009Ros et al, , 2017 and how much episodic detail is shared to describe unique life events (Addis et al, 2008;Devitt et al, 2017;Gaesser et al, 2011;Levine et al, 2002). The present study utilized the EAR, a method that has recently been applied to capture memories being shared in everyday conversations as they happen (Brianza & Demiray, 2019;Demiray et al, 2018;2019), in order to extend the assessment of episodic specificity out of the laboratory and shed light on how older age and episodic specificity are related in the real-world.…”

“…Recently, the EAR has been applied to assess autobiographical sharing in natural, everyday social life, revealing outcomes that replicate and go beyond findings from the laboratory. For instance, prior work using the EAR has shown that in everyday social interactions, older adults tend to be past-oriented (Demiray et al, 2018) and share fewer future thoughts than young adults (Brianza & Demiray, 2019). Older adults also appear to share autobiographical memories in their natural social relationships for specific motives .…”

“…In the present sample, The EAR recorded for 30 seconds every 6-18 minutes except during a six-hour overnight period starting 30 minutes after participants' bedtime (M = 10:54pm; range = 9:00pm -12:30am). From the EAR recordings, we extracted autobiographical memories and future thoughts being shared by the participants in social situations (Demiray et al, 2018) to understand the sharing frequency of different forms of personal knowledge (i.e., episodic versus semantic, past and future). We then scored for detail composition within each instance of autobiographical episodic sharing using the well-established Autobiographical Interview (AI) protocol (Levine et al, 2002).…”

Updating and reasoning: Different processes, different models, different functions

“…For humans, however, the past seems to have a special status independent from what it tells us about the future. This fact becomes particularly apparent in conversational behavior where people have been found to display a "retrospective bias" by talking two to three times more often about the past than the future (Demiray et al 2018). Some consequences of the ability to represent time should have generated evolutionary pressure for the ability to represent the past in its own right, independently from its benefits for future-directed cognition.…”