Devitt Aleea L, Addis Donna Rose, Schacter Daniel L
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
School of Psychology and Centre for Brain Research, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Mem Cognit. 2017 Oct;45(7):1078-1094. doi: 10.3758/s13421-017-0716-1.
Autobiographical memories of past events and imaginations of future scenarios comprise both episodic and semantic content. Correlating the amount of "internal" (episodic) and "external" (semantic) details generated when describing autobiographical events can illuminate the relationship between the processes supporting these constructs. Yet previous studies performing such correlations were limited by aggregating data across all events generated by an individual, potentially obscuring the underlying relationship within the events themselves. In the current article, we reanalyzed datasets from eight studies using a multilevel approach, allowing us to explore the relationship between internal and external details within events. We also examined whether this relationship changes with healthy aging. Our reanalyses demonstrated a largely negative relationship between the internal and external details produced when describing autobiographical memories and future imaginations. This negative relationship was stronger and more consistent for older adults and was evident both in direct and indirect measures of semantic content. Moreover, this relationship appears to be specific to episodic tasks, as no relationship was observed for a nonepisodic picture description task. This negative association suggests that people do not generate semantic information indiscriminately, but do so in a compensatory manner, to embellish episodically impoverished events. Our reanalysis further lends support for dissociable processes underpinning episodic and semantic information generation when remembering and imagining autobiographical events.
对过去事件的自传体记忆和对未来情景的想象都包含情节性和语义性内容。将描述自传体事件时产生的“内部”（情节性）和“外部”（语义性）细节的数量进行关联，可以阐明支持这些结构的过程之间的关系。然而，以往进行这种关联的研究受到限制，因为它们汇总了个体产生的所有事件的数据，这可能会掩盖事件本身内部的潜在关系。在本文中，我们使用多层次方法重新分析了八项研究的数据集，这使我们能够探索事件内部的内部细节和外部细节之间的关系。我们还研究了这种关系是否会随着健康衰老而变化。我们的重新分析表明，在描述自传体记忆和未来想象时产生的内部细节和外部细节之间在很大程度上呈负相关。这种负相关在老年人中更强且更一致，并且在语义内容的直接和间接测量中都很明显。此外，这种关系似乎特定于情节性任务，因为在非情节性图片描述任务中未观察到关系。这种负相关表明，人们不会随意生成语义信息，而是以一种补偿方式生成语义信息，以美化情节匮乏的事件。我们的重新分析进一步支持了在回忆和想象自传体事件时，支撑情节性和语义性信息生成的可分离过程。
