The influence of event similarity on the detailed recall of autobiographical memories

Abstract

Memories for life events are thought to be organized based on their relationships with one another, affecting the order in which events are recalled, such that similar events tend to be recalled together. However, less is known about how detailed recall for a given event is affected by its associations to other events. Here, we used a cued autobiographical memory recall task where participants verbally recalled events corresponding to personal photographs. Importantly, we characterized the temporal, spatial, and semantic associations between each event to assess how similarity between adjacently cued events affected detailed recall. We found that participants provided more non-episodic details for cued events when the preceding event was both semantically similar and either temporally or spatially dissimilar. However, similarity along time, space, or semantics between adjacent events did not affect the episodic details recalled. We interpret this by considering organization at the level of a life narrative, rather than individual events. When recalling a stream of personal events, we may feel obligated to justify any seeming discrepancies between adjacent events that are semantically similar, yet simultaneously temporally or spatially dissimilar-to do so, we provide additional supplementary detail to help maintain global coherence across the events in our lives.