The degree of disparateness of event details modulates future simulation construction, plausibility, and recall

Abstract

Several episodic simulation studies have suggested that the plausibility of future events may be influenced by the disparateness of the details comprising the event. However, no study had directly investigated this idea. In the current study, we designed a novel episodic combination paradigm that varied the disparateness of details through a social sphere manipulation. Participants recalled memory details from three different social spheres. Details were recombined either within spheres or across spheres to create detail sets for which participants imagined future events in a second session. Across-sphere events were rated as significantly less plausible than within-sphere events and were remembered less often. The presented paradigm, which increases control over the disparateness of details in future event simulations, may be useful for future studies concerned with the similarity of the simulations to previous events and its plausibility.

Keywords:

• Episodic future though
• Simulation
• Imagination
• Autobiographical memory

ORCID

Valerie van Mulukom http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0549-7365

Daniel L. Schacter http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2460-6061

Michael C. Corballis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3126-6114

Donna Rose Addis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6231-1491

Notes

¹The delay duration between detail recollection and future event simulations did not correlate with the percentage of future events recalled (r = .04, p = .85).

²Given that the nonsignificant difference of temporal distance between the sphere conditions was nevertheless a medium-sized effect (d_z = 0.46), we explored whether temporal distance correlated with key dependent variables. These correlations were generally weak (plausibility: r = −.25, p = .26; detail: r = −.14, p = .54; coherency: r = −.22, p = .32, difficulty: r = .14, p = .52; emotion: r = .10, p = .64), suggesting that differences in temporal distance on the order of a few weeks are not likely to affect phenomenology of details that were imagined to occur more than a year in the future.

³We calculated a percentage of the total events per sphere condition rather than comparing the number of recalled trials directly as the number of total trials could slightly differ between the sphere conditions due to the exclusion criteria (see the beginning of the Results section).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Marsden Fund [grant number UOA0810], [grant number UOA1210]; Rutherford Discovery Fellowship [grant number RDF-10-UOA-024]; and the National Institutes on Aging [grant number R01 AG08441].