School of Psychology and Centre for Brain Research.
Rotman Research Institute.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2020 Aug;46(8):1424-1441. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000831. Epub 2020 Mar 5.
Reports on differences between remembering the past and imagining the future have led to the hypothesis that constructing future events is a more cognitively demanding process. However, factors that influence these increased demands, such as whether the event has been previously constructed and the types of details comprising the event, have remained relatively unexplored. Across two experiments, we examined how these factors influence the process of constructing event representations by having participants repeatedly construct events and measuring how construction times and a range of phenomenological ratings changed across time points. In Experiment 1, we contrasted the construction of past and future events and found that, relative to past events, the constructive demands associated with future events are particularly heightened when these events are imagined for the first time. Across repeated simulations, future events became increasingly similar to past events in terms of construction times and incorporated detail. In Experiment 2, participants imagined future events involving two memory details (person, location) and then reimagined the event either (a) exactly the same, (b) with a different person, or (c) in a different location. We predicted that if generating spatial information is particularly important for event construction, a change in location will have the greatest impact on constructive demands. Results showed that spatial context contributed to these heightened constructive demands more so than person details, consistent with theories highlighting the central role of spatial processing in episodic simulation. We discuss the findings from both studies in the light of relational processing demands and consider implications for current theoretical frameworks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
关于记忆过去和想象未来之间差异的报告导致了这样一种假设，即构建未来事件是一个认知要求更高的过程。然而，影响这些更高要求的因素，如事件是否以前被构建过，以及构成事件的细节类型，仍然相对没有得到探索。在两项实验中，我们通过让参与者反复构建事件来研究这些因素如何影响事件表征的构建过程，并测量构建时间和一系列现象学评分如何随时间点的变化而变化。在实验 1 中，我们对比了过去和未来事件的构建，发现与过去事件相比，当首次想象未来事件时，与未来事件相关的构建需求特别高。在多次模拟中，未来事件在构建时间和纳入的细节方面越来越类似于过去事件。在实验 2 中，参与者想象了涉及两个记忆细节（人物、地点）的未来事件，然后重新想象该事件（a）完全相同，（b）有不同的人物，或（c）在不同的地点。我们预测，如果生成空间信息对事件构建特别重要，那么地点的变化将对构建需求产生最大影响。结果表明，空间背景对这些高度构建需求的贡献比人物细节更大，这与强调空间处理在情景模拟中的核心作用的理论一致。我们根据关系处理需求讨论了这两项研究的结果，并考虑了它们对当前理论框架的影响。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。
