Constructing autobiographical events within a spatial or temporal context: a comparison of two targeted episodic induction techniques

ABSTRACT

Recalling and imagining autobiographical experiences involves constructing event representations within spatiotemporal contexts. We tested whether generating autobiographical events within a primarily spatial (where the event occurred) or temporal (the sequence of actions that occurred) context affected how the associated mental representation was constructed. We leveraged the well-validated episodic specificity induction (ESI) technique, known to influence the use of episodic processes on subsequent tasks, to develop variants that selectively enhance spatial or temporal processing. We tested the effects of these inductions on the details used to describe past and future autobiographical events. We first replicated the standard ESI effect, showing that ESI enhances generating episodic details, particularly those that are perception-based, when describing autobiographical events (Experiment 1). We then directly compared the effects of the spatial and temporal inductions (Experiment 2 and 3). When describing autobiographical events, spatial induction enhanced generating episodic details, specifically perception-based details, compared to the control or temporal inductions. A greater proportion of the episodic details generated after the temporal induction were gist-based than after the spatial induction, but this proportion did not differ from a control induction. Thus, using a spatial or temporal framework for autobiographical event generation alters the associated details that are accessed.

KEYWORDS:

• Episodic memory
• autobiographical memory
• spatial context
• temporal context
• mental construction

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Wendy Wang, Stephanie Simpson, Carina Fan, Sonja Chu, and Idil Uner who contributed to testing and scoring. SS designed the study, analysed the data, and drafted the manuscript with input from LG, KM and DS. This study was supported by funds provided from an NSERC Discovery grant awarded to SS (#RGPIN-04241) as well as from the Canadian Research Chair Program. DLS was supported by National Institute of Mental Health R01 MH060941 and National Institute on Aging R01 AG008441. KPM was supported by National Institute on Aging grant F32AG059341.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kevin P. Madore http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9864-962X

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an NSERC Discovery grant awarded to SS (#RGPIN-04241) and funds provided to SS from the Canadian Research Chair Program.