Linking Detail to Temporal Structure in Naturalistic-Event Recall

Abstract

Decades of memory research demonstrate the importance of temporal organization in recall dynamics, using laboratory stimuli (i.e., word lists) at seconds- to minutes-long delays. Little is known, however, about such organization in recall of richer and more remote real-world experiences, in which the focus is usually on memory content without reference to event order. Here, 119 younger and older adults freely recalled extended real-world experiences, for which the encoding sequence was controlled, after 2 days or 1 week. We paired analytical tools from the list-learning and autobiographical memory literatures to measure spontaneous contextual dynamics and details in these recall narratives. Recall dynamics were organized by temporal context (contiguity and forward asymmetry), and organization was reduced in older age, despite similar serial position effects and recall initiation across age groups. Across participants, organization was positively associated with richness of episodic detail, providing evidence for a link between reexperiencing past events and reinstating their spatiotemporal context.

The Truth Is Out There: Accuracy in Recall of Verifiable Real-World Events

“…Whereas the present study focused on the content of recall, we did not assess the degree to which the sequence of freely recalled details corresponded to the encoded sequence of events. In a separate study, we found that such temporally organized recall dynamics (previously assessed with word-list recall) can be reliably measured in real-world event recall and that these are sensitive to aging (Diamond & Levine, 2020). Future studies could test theories of false remembering derived from laboratory studies in naturalistic contexts by combining the staged-event method with manipulations at encoding (e.g., by altering the confusability of events) or retrieval (e.g., induction or probing to elicit more details; see St.…”

“…Free recall of the tour was collected for participants in the naturalistic arm of this study ( n = 41; referred to hereafter as the “Tour-Y” and “Tour-O” groups of younger and older participants, respectively). These free-recall protocols were also analyzed in a separate study in which we investigated the dynamics of memory search (Diamond & Levine, 2020). All participants were screened for history of neurological disease, active significant medical or psychiatric illness or consumption of medication that may affect memory, and active or recent substance abuse.…”

“…Note: A companion article by Diamond and Levine (2020) appears online at https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620958651 and on pages 1557–1572 of this issue. The two articles overlap in several ways, including research participants, but the theoretical issues explored in the two articles are sufficiently distinct to warrant their publication as separate works.…”

Slices of the past: how events are temporally compressed in episodic memory

“…Indeed, research has shown that periods of stability or gradual change in contextual features (e.g., one's surroundings and internal states) makes temporally proximal experiences to cohere with one another in memory (Howard, 2017;Polyn & Cutler, 2017), whereas contextual changes create separations in memory (i.e., event boundaries) that lead to distinct representational units (Clewett & Davachi, 2017;DuBrow et al, 2017;Radvansky & Zacks, 2017). While this organizational role of contextual states has been mainly evidenced using laboratory stimuli (i.e., word lists), recent studies have shown that the recall dynamics of real-world events follow similar principles (e.g., a temporal contiguity effect) (Diamond & Levine, 2020;Stawarczyk & D'Argembeau, 2019). Thus, contextual stability may contribute to the integration of information into meaningful experience units, whereas contextual shifts may be used as transition points to skip segments of past experience when remembering the unfolding of events:…”

A predictive processing model of episodic memory and time perception

“…Further work is required to determine the depth to which our model (or our modelling approach more generally) reproduces the many other known features of human episodic memory (see [91]). In particular, future work will need to address the precise degree to which important concepts in the memory literature such as primacy, and recency and contiguity [96][97][98] are produced in our memory model. Though it is worth noting that contiguity and forward asymmetry are preserved in principle by the model construction, with related events recorded and reconstructed in sequence within hierarchically nested episodes (see Figure 4).…”