The influence of shifting perspective on episodic and semantic details during autobiographical memory recall

ABSTRACT

Shifting to a novel visual perspective during retrieval influences autobiographical memories (AM) and can lead to persistent changes in memories. Adopting an observer-like compared to an own eyes perspective reduces episodic information during AM recall, but less is known regarding how viewpoint influences semantic information. In the current study, we investigated how shifting from an own eyes to an observer-like perspective during narrative recall of AMs influences episodic and semantic information. Shifting perspective reduced the number of episodic details associated with emotions and thoughts, and also led to similar reductions in personal semantics. We replicated prior research showing that shifting perspective reduces emotional intensity in subsequent memories, but these subjective changes were not coupled with objective changes in a narrative recall. Our findings suggest that shifting perspective influences the interplay between episodic and semantic information during proximate recall and subjective changes when memories are later recalled.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• visual perspective
• narrative recall
• episodic memory
• semantic memory

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Alexis Carpenter for assistance with participant recruitment. The authors acknowledge the support of funding from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Undergraduate Summer Research Award awarded to Chloe I. King and Anna S. L. Romero, a University of Alberta Undergraduate Researcher Stipend awarded to Anna S. L. Romero, the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Aging (AG00841) awarded to Daniel L. Schacter, and the Canada Research Chairs Program and Discovery Grant from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2019-06080, DGECR-2019-00407) awarded to Peggy L. St. Jacques. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding sources. DLS and PLS conceived and designed the study. PLS collected the data. CIK, ASLR and PLS analysed and interpreted the data. CIK, ASLR and PLS wrote the manuscript with contributions from DLS. All authors commented on the manuscript and approved the final version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We aimed to elicit a larger number of events to include strong observer perspectives, but only 22 out of 40 participants had a sufficient number of these memories. Thus, here we focus on strong own eyes memories only.

2 Narrative data and subjective ratings from Session 2 and 3 were missing for one participant due to a technical issue.

3 In Session 2, based on the final emotional intensity ratings during narrative recall.

4 We also conducted separate mixed effects models for the difference in personal semantics, emotion/thoughts, and perceptual details, in which we controlled for the emotional valence of memories (positive valence – negative valence) based on subjective ratings provided in Session One. Controlling for the initial emotional valence of the memories did not affect the results of the mixed effects model.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canada Research Chairs Program, National Institute on Aging [grant number AG00841] and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [grant number DGECR-2019-00407, RGPIN-2019-06080].