RT @YiningDing: If you are at #psynom24 and are interested in temporal order memory in narrative reading, please come and check out my post….

I thought this was a polling map and my anxiety spiked

Well, now my heart rate is gonna be up for a few hours

Great talks from my lab and extended lab fam! (Also, hey, Maverick is about to be applying for academic jobs, so keep an eye out!)

It’s hard to overstate how ironic it is that a nation whose existence is predicated on rejecting monarchy just decided that, actually, we want our president to be a king.

RT @terminallyOL: gm

I love my lab, but damn 🤣

Alright, that’s enough from me. Hope you enjoy! I want to shout out @aidelarazan for an absolutely heroic effort on this project, which began as her Master’s thesis a couple of years back🙂

However, we’re showing here that time isn’t the whole story. In fact, we actively override and abandon temporal organization in favor of meaningful links, like narratively coherent connections, that we use to bend the arrow of time to our benefit when remembering what happened.

Okay, so what? First, I’ll note that we DO find evidence for temporal organization when people recall naturalistic events. That makes sense: time is an important component of experience, and loads of evidence suggests that we use it to organize memories.

It gets deeper! If you quantify temporal clustering in their event recall – a well-established approach in list learning tasks – we find that coherent narratives are uniquely NOT organized temporally. And this happens alongside overall BENEFITS to recalling these events.

And here’s my favorite part: if you compare people’s recalled event orders to the presented order in the narrative, we find that people are systematically “pinching together” coherent events that span a long temporal lag. They’re reorganizing the narrative timeline in memory!

First off, we whoppingly replicate the narrative coherence boost! Whereas cueing by character may have nudged people to emphasize these coherent narratives when recalling the story, we now know people tend to do this freely and naturally.

In experiment 3, we switched to free recall instead of character-cued recall. Whereas cueing by character may have pushed subjects to pre-organize their event representations, free recall could give us a better look at how the narrative timeline is organized without constraints.

For the first 2 experiments, we cued recall by character, and also had folks do two explicit tests of temporal memory: event distance judgments, and judgments of when individual events occurred. Coherence boosted recall irrespective of lag, and it had no effect on temporal memory

We predicted that narrative coherence should interact with temporal context to organize memories. This might show up in two ways: the influence of narrative coherence on recall may be more evident at longer lags, and coherence might systematically distort memory for time.

The crux of the design is that some events featuring a specific character form a coherent narrative (i.e., meaningfully connect across time), and others don’t. We also manipulated the lag between events. Given narrative coherence and time as factors, what organizes event recall?

Movies are fine stimuli, but experimentalists sometimes like to have some degree of control. Angelique built on a prior narrative stimulus written by Brendan, and added animations with The Sims to aid in immersion (and because…well, why not?)

How well does this hold up for complex experiences? Many, us included, have gotten interested in the consequences narratives and their structure have on memory. A nice aspect of narratives is that they emulate the messy, complex, and interconnected nature of real-world events.

How are our memories organized when we recall events? A mountain of work (e.g., the Temporal Context Model) has emphasized the importance of time. In short: things that happened close together tend to be recalled near one another, and we tend to sweep forward as we recall.