Priming, not inhibition, of related concepts during future imagining

ABSTRACT

Remembering the past and imagining the future both involve the retrieval of details stored in episodic memory and rely on the same core network of brain regions. Given these parallels, one might expect similar component processes to be involved in remembering and imagining. While a strong case can be made for the role of inhibition in memory retrieval, few studies have examined whether inhibition is also necessary for future imagining and results to-date have been mixed. In the current study, we test whether related concepts are inhibited during future imagining using a modified priming approach. Participants first generated a list of familiar places and for each place, the people they most strongly associate with it. A week later, participants imagined future events involving recombinations of people and places, immediately followed by a speeded response task in which participants made familiarity decisions about people’s names. Across two experiments, our results suggest that related concepts are not inhibited during future imagining, but rather are automatically primed. These results fit with recent work showing that autobiographically significant concepts (e.g., friends’ names) are more episodic than semantic in nature, automatically activating related details in memory and potentially fuelling the flexible simulation of future events.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• future
• imagination
• inhibition
• priming

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Erratum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

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

Notes

1. This effect remains significant if a false discovery rate (FDR) correction for multiple comparisons (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995) is used for the three paired t-tests reported here (corrected significance level q* = .033), but not if a Bonferroni correction is used (q* = .017). However, correcting for multiple comparisons is not entirely warranted in this case, given that our primary interest was in the comparison between the original associate and baseline conditions. The other contrasts are simply given for sake of comparison.

2. Note that item-wise correlations could not be calculated for participants who showed no variability in the number of times a name was mentioned during pretesting (i.e., names used on RT task were only mentioned once).

3. Frequency could not be equated for two participants.

4. Both of these tests remain significant if we correct for multiple comparisons using either FDR (q* = .05) or Bonferroni correction (q* = .025).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Institute on Aging [grant number AG08441] to D. L. Schacter.