Making the future memorable: The phenomenology of remembered future events

Although our ability to remember future simulations conveys an adaptive advantage, enabling us to better prepare for upcoming events, the factors influencing the memorability of future simulations are not clear. In this study, participants generated future simulations that combined specific people,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Memory (Hove) 2015-11, Vol.23 (8), p.1255-1263
Main Authors: McLelland, Victoria C, Devitt, Aleea L, Schacter, Daniel L, Addis, Donna Rose
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Cues
Emotions
Female
Forecasting
Humans
Imagination
Male
Memory
Memory, Episodic
Mental Recall
Models, Psychological
Recognition (Psychology)
Young Adult
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Summary:Although our ability to remember future simulations conveys an adaptive advantage, enabling us to better prepare for upcoming events, the factors influencing the memorability of future simulations are not clear. In this study, participants generated future simulations that combined specific people, places and objects from memory, and for each trial, made a series of phenomenological ratings about the event components and the simulation as a whole. Memory for simulations was later assessed using a cued-recall test. We used multilevel modelling to determine whether the phenomenological qualities of event components (familiarity, emotionality and significance) and simulations (detail, plausibility) were predictive of whether the simulation was successfully encoded and later accessible. Our results demonstrate that person familiarity, detail and plausibility were significant predictors of whether a given future simulation was encoded into memory and later accessible. These findings suggest that scaffolding future simulations with pre-existing episodic memories is the path to a memorable future.
ISSN:0965-8211
1464-0686
DOI:10.1080/09658211.2014.972960