Narratives bridge the divide between distant events in episodic memory

Many studies suggest that information about past experience, or episodic memory, is divided into discrete units called “events.” Yet we can often remember experiences that span multiple events. Events that occur in close succession might simply be linked because of their proximity to one another, bu...

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Veröffentlicht in:Memory & cognition Jg. 50; H. 3; S. 478 - 494
Hauptverfasser: Cohn-Sheehy, Brendan I., Delarazan, Angelique I., Crivelli-Decker, Jordan E., Reagh, Zachariah M., Mundada, Nidhi S., Yonelinas, Andrew P., Zacks, Jeffrey M., Ranganath, Charan
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: New York Springer US 01.04.2022
Springer Nature B.V
Schlagworte:
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Coherence
Distant
Encoding
Episodic memory
Experiments
Humans
Immediate recall
Information retrieval
Learning
Memory
Memory Consolidation
Memory, Episodic
Mental Recall
Narration
Narratives
Proximity
Psychology
Recall
Semantic memory
Semantics
Sleep
Succession
Recall
Consolidation
Narratives
Episodic memory
Event cognition
ISSN:0090-502X, 1532-5946, 1532-5946
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Zusammenfassung:Many studies suggest that information about past experience, or episodic memory, is divided into discrete units called “events.” Yet we can often remember experiences that span multiple events. Events that occur in close succession might simply be linked because of their proximity to one another, but we can also build links between events that occur farther apart in time. Intuitively, some kind of organizing principle should enable temporally distant events to become bridged in memory. We tested the hypothesis that episodic memory exhibits a narrative-level organization, enabling temporally distant events to be better remembered if they form a coherent narrative. Furthermore, we tested whether post-encoding memory consolidation is necessary to integrate temporally distant events. In three experiments, participants learned and subsequently recalled events from fictional stories, in which pairs of temporally distant events involving side characters (“sideplots”) either formed one coherent narrative or two unrelated narratives. Across participants, we varied whether recall was assessed immediately after learning, or after a delay: 24 hours, 12 hours between morning and evening (“wake”), or 12 hours between evening and morning (“sleep”). Participants recalled more information about coherent than unrelated narrative events, in most delay conditions, including immediate recall and wake conditions, suggesting that post-encoding consolidation was not necessary to integrate temporally distant events into a larger narrative. Furthermore, post hoc modeling across experiments suggested that narrative coherence facilitated recall over and above any effects of sentence-level semantic similarity. This reliable memory benefit for coherent narrative events supports theoretical accounts which propose that narratives provide a high-level architecture for episodic memory.
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ISSN:0090-502X
1532-5946
1532-5946
DOI:10.3758/s13421-021-01178-x