It takes me back: The mnemonic time-travel effect

Abstract

Given the links between motion and temporal thinking, it is surprising that no studies have examined the possibility that transporting participants back mentally towards the time of encoding could improve memory. Six experiments investigated whether backward motion would promote recall relative to forward motion or no-motion conditions. Participants saw a video of a staged crime (Experiments 1, 3 and 5), a word list (Experiments 2 and 4) or a set of pictures (Experiment 6). Then, they walked forward or backwards (Experiments 1 and 2), watched a forward-or backward-directed optic flow-inducing video (Experiments 3 and 4) or imagined walking forward or backwards (Experiments 5 and 6). Finally, they answered questions about the video or recalled words or pictures. The results demonstrated for the first time that motion-induced past-directed mental time travel improved mnemonic performance for different types of information. We briefly discuss theoretical and practical implications of this "mnemonic time-travel effect".

Immunometabolic cross-talk in the inflamed heart

“…Many studies have explored the relationship between decompensated cardiac remodelling and cardiac substrate utilization. Whereas the question of whether FFA utilization is decreased [64–67] or unchanged [68, 69] during compensated hypertrophy remains subject to debate, the majority of studies reported that the development of overt cardiac dysfunction is accompanied by reduced FFA oxidation [70, 71] (Figure 2A) . This metabolic shift was confirmed in multiple animal models of HF, including ischaemic [72] and pacing-induced [73] HF, and was supported by clinical studies reporting a reduced FFA oxidative capacity in HF [74, 75].…”

The “Mnemonic Time-Travel Effect”

“…To allow the experiment to be run on the same computer without interruption, the word list, the Tetris game, the video clip, and the memory test were all presented within the same computer program written in LiveCode (see https://livecode.com). Aksentijevic et al (2019) report measures of 26.7 cm  19.9 cm for the video used for the optic-flow manipulation (resulting in visual angles of 33.05°Â 25°at a viewing distance of 45 cm). This corresponds to a 4:3 aspect ratio and thus differs from the 16:9 aspect ratio of the original 1,280  720 pixel train journey video.…”

“…The significance level is set to .05. The most critical of the comparisons reported by Aksentijevic et al (2019) is that between the backward condition and the forward condition. Based on the test statistics reported by Aksentijevic et al, a sample effect size of d z = 1.05 for the within-subject comparison between these conditions can be assumed.…”

“…We chose to perform a close preregistered replication of Experiment 4 (optic flow and word recall) of Aksentijevic et al (2019). There are several reasons for choosing Experiment 4 as the target of replication.…”

“…(2) The repeated-measures design employed in this experiment is more efficient than the between-groups comparisons employed in the other experiments. Aksentijevic et al (2019) argued that a sample size of only 17 participants was necessary to observe the effect with sufficient statistical power and wrote that they were "acting conservatively" by increasing the sample size to 25 (p. 245).…”