a Department of Psychology , McGill University , Montreal , QC , Canada.
b Department of Psychology , Stanford University , Standford , CA , USA.
Memory. 2019 Aug;27(7):881-893. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2019.1586952. Epub 2019 Mar 8.
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.
回忆和想象自传体经历涉及在时空背景下构建事件表征。我们测试了在主要是空间（事件发生的地点）或时间（发生的动作序列）背景下生成自传体事件是否会影响相关心理表征的构建方式。我们利用了经过充分验证的情节特异性诱导（ESI）技术，该技术已知会影响后续任务中情节过程的使用，开发了选择性增强空间或时间处理的变体。我们测试了这些诱导对描述过去和未来自传体事件所使用的细节的影响。我们首先复制了标准的 ESI 效应，表明 ESI 增强了在描述自传体事件时生成情节细节的能力，特别是那些基于感知的细节（实验 1）。然后，我们直接比较了空间和时间诱导的效果（实验 2 和 3）。在描述自传体事件时，与控制或时间诱导相比，空间诱导增强了生成基于感知的情节细节的能力。与空间诱导相比，时间诱导后生成的情节细节中基于要点的比例更大，但与控制诱导相比没有差异。因此，使用自传体事件生成的空间或时间框架会改变所访问的相关细节。
