18 research outputs found
An optimistic outlook creates a rosy past: The impact of episodic simulation on subsequent memory
No full textRaw data and materials for Devitt & Schacter, Psychological Science: An optimistic outlook creates a rosy past: The impact of episodic simulation on subsequent memor
An optimistic outlook creates a rosy past: The impact of episodic simulation on subsequent memory
No full textRaw data and materials for Devitt & Schacter, Psychological Science: An optimistic outlook creates a rosy past: The impact of episodic simulation on subsequent memor
DevittSupplementalMaterial – Supplemental material for An Optimistic Outlook Creates a Rosy Past: The Impact of Episodic Simulation on Subsequent Memory
No full textSupplemental material, DevittSupplementalMaterial for An Optimistic Outlook Creates a Rosy Past: The Impact of Episodic Simulation on Subsequent Memory by Aleea L. Devitt and Daniel L. Schacter in Psychological Science</p
DevittOpenPracticesDisclosure – Supplemental material for An Optimistic Outlook Creates a Rosy Past: The Impact of Episodic Simulation on Subsequent Memory
No full textSupplemental material, DevittOpenPracticesDisclosure for An Optimistic Outlook Creates a Rosy Past: The Impact of Episodic Simulation on Subsequent Memory by Aleea L. Devitt and Daniel L. Schacter in Psychological Science</p
Child past and future thinking: What children remember and imagine, and the role of parental mind-mindedness and elaboration
No full textThinking about memories and possible future events allows us to prepare for the future. Whilst we are beginning to understand how past and future thinking develops in early childhood, little is known about these processes in middle childhood and how parental factors, like mind-mindedness and elaborations, influence them. This study examined the content of past and future thoughts in 11- to 13-year-olds and the role of these parental factors. We collected data from 21 parent-child dyads in three different phases: a) parents completed an online survey involving a measure of mind-mindedness; b) parents and children completed a joint Zoom session measuring parental elaborations; c) children completed an independent Zoom session measuring past and future thoughts. Children generated more relevant details for past thoughts than future thoughts, while the amount of off-topic details was similar between past and future thoughts. This pattern indicates that children are proficient at retrieving relevant information, but they are more proficient at this retrieval when thinking about memories than imagining the future. Children subjectively rated past and future thoughts as similarly important and vivid but reported thinking more frequently about future thoughts than past thoughts. This pattern illustrates that, for children, memories and future events are equally important and visualised equally. However, children imagine the future more often than they reminisce about the past. These findings enhance our understanding of the functioning of past and future thinking in middle childhood. No relationship was found between parents’ understanding of their children, parents’ elaborations, and children’s past and future thoughts. We replicated and extended previous findings with a novel age group, thereby contributing to a lifespan overview of past and future thinking. Our research has practical implications for parents, teachers, and clinicians. A longitudinal design in future research would further assist in understanding past and future thinking across childhood
Autobiographical Memory Conjunction Errors: Factors Influencing Memory Accuracy
No full textIt has long been recognised that episodic memory representations are stored as constituent features distributed widely across the brain, and that retrieval of a coherent episode requires these fragments to be relocated, reactivated and reintegrated. This reconstructive memory system is subject to a range of distortions, including erroneous incorporation of features from one memory into another, forming what are known as memory conjunction errors. Factors influencing the generation of conjunction errors in autobiographical memory (AM) have thus far received little empirical attention. Understanding the nature of AM conjunction errors affords us the opportunity to identify the circumstances that may facilitate the occurrence of these errors, particularly in situations where memory authenticity is of high priority, such as eyewitness testimony. The studies in this thesis illuminate several factors influencing the prevalence of AM conjunction errors. Study 1 demonstrates an imagination inflation effect for AM conjunction errors, whereby generating a highly vivid and plausible simulation at encoding increases the likelihood of a conjunction error later forming. Study 2 further reveals that the subjective and objective qualities of conjunction events at retrieval are similar to those of authentic memories, in line with a source monitoring account of false memories. In Studies 3 and 4 the cognitive processes underlying AM conjunction error formation were evaluated through the lens of healthy aging. Study 3 extends findings of an age-related increase in conjunction errors for simple laboratory stimuli to distinctive and personally-relevant AMs. Study 4 further demonstrates that declines in inhibition ability may underlie the increased rates of AM conjunction errors with age, and can account for some of the individual variation in conjunction error susceptibility in younger adults. These findings speak towards an overreliance on the familiarity garnered by the individual components of a conjunction lure, as well as a phenomenological dedifferentiation of conjunction events and veridical memories, as contributing to the formation of AM conjunction errors. This research expands our knowledge of the types of memory distortions to which the constructive memory system is prone, and also elucidates some of the mechanisms by which these errors are misattributed as reality
An Optimistic Outlook Creates a Rosy Past: The Impact of Episodic Simulation on Subsequent Memory
No full text People frequently engage in future thinking in everyday life, but it is unknown how simulating an event in advance changes how that event is remembered once it takes place. To initiate study of this important topic, we conducted two experiments in which participants simulated emotional events before learning the hypothetical outcome of each event via narratives. Memory was assessed for emotional details contained in those narratives. Positive simulation resulted in a liberal response bias for positive information and a conservative bias for negative information. Events preceded by positive simulation were considered more favorably in retrospect. In contrast, negative simulation had no impact on subsequent memory. Results were similar across an immediate and delayed memory test and for past and future simulation. These results provide novel insights into the cognitive consequences of episodic future simulation and build on the optimism-bias literature by showing that adopting a favorable outlook results in a rosy memory. </jats:p
Adaptive constructive processes: An episodic specificity induction impacts false recall in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm
No full textNumerous studies indicate that an episodic specificity induction (ESI) - brief training in recollecting the details of a past experience - enhances performance on subsequent tasks that rely on episodic retrieval, including autobiographical memory, imagination, problem solving, and creative thinking. In four experiments, we examined whether these benefits of the ESI extend to reducing susceptibility to false memory, or whether they are accompanied by a cost in the form of increased susceptibility to false memory. To assess how ESI impacts false memory generation, we used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, a reliable procedure for generating false memories. When an ESI was administered after DRM list presentation and just before a free recall test, rates of false recall for critical lures were significantly enhanced relative to a control induction. These findings support the hypothesis that ESI operates to boost recollection of illusory episodic details associated with critical lures in the DRM, and suggest that constructive rather than reproductive episodic retrieval processes support the wide-ranging benefits of ESI on a range of cognitive tasks
Decoding the emotional valence of future thoughts
No full textAffective future thinking allows us to prepare for future outcomes, but we know little about neural representation of emotional future simulations. We used a multi-voxel pattern analysis to determine whether patterns of neural activity can reliably distinguish between positive and negative future simulations. Neural patterning in the anterior cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortices distinguished positive from negative future simulations, indicating that these regions code for the emotional valence of future events. These results support prior findings that anterior medial regions contain representations of emotions across various stimuli, and contribute to identifying potential rewarding outcomes of future events. More broadly, these results demonstrate that the phenomenological features of future thinking can be decoded using neural activity
