University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2010 Jan;38(1):3-12. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.1.3.
After thinking about the past and imagining the future, how do people separate these real and imagined events in memory? We had subjects engage in past and future autobiographical elaboration, then later take memory tests that required them to recollect these earlier generated events. In Experiment 1, testing memory for previously generated past or future autobiographical events led to fewer source memory confusions than did an elaborative control task, suggesting that the distinctive features of autobiographical elaboration improved subsequent retrieval monitoring accuracy. In Experiment 2, we directly compared retrieval monitoring accuracy for previously generated past and future autobiographical events and found that subjects made fewer source confusions when searching memory for future events. This asymmetry suggests that the features characterizing future elaborations (e.g., cognitive operations) were used more effectively during reality monitoring than were the features characterizing past elaborations (e.g., perceptual details), and has implications for future-oriented theories of memory.
人们在思考过去和想象未来后，是如何在记忆中区分这些真实和想象的事件的？我们让受试者进行过去和未来自传体的详细描述，然后在之后的记忆测试中，要求他们回忆这些之前生成的事件。在实验 1 中，对先前生成的过去或未来自传体事件的记忆测试导致的来源记忆混淆比详细的控制任务少，这表明自传体详细描述的独特特征提高了随后的检索监测准确性。在实验 2 中，我们直接比较了对先前生成的过去和未来自传体事件的检索监测准确性，发现当受试者在记忆中搜索未来事件时，他们的源混淆更少。这种不对称表明，在现实监测过程中，未来描述的特征（例如认知操作）比过去描述的特征（例如感知细节）更有效地被使用，这对面向未来的记忆理论具有启示意义。
