Bringing Order to Life: Temporal Order Effects during the Recall of Important Autobiographical Memories in Young and Old Adults

OBJECTIVE

The present study investigated whether younger and older adults differ in the extent to which they order their important autobiographical memories (AMs) in a chronological way during recall. Moreover, the number of autobiographical memories to be recalled was systematically varied in order to examine whether manipulating the size of the search sample affects the use of a chronological recall strategy.

METHODS

Data come from 118 younger adults (M = 23.12, SD = 3.33) and 124 older adults (M = 69.79, SD = 8.94) who recalled either seven or thirteen important AMs.

RESULTS

Using multilevel linear growth models, a temporal order effect for younger and older adults was found. For older adults, the temporal order effect was much more pronounced. The number of recalled events, however, did not affect the temporal order effect.

CONCLUSION

Our findings point to a higher need for a structured search or a stronger engagement in autobiographical reasoning processes in older age. Furthermore, asking for important AMs encourages participants to provide a comprehensive overview of their life independent of the number of important AMs to be recalled.

Autobiographical memory and the self: A transition theory perspective

In contrast to much theoretical work on the topic, Transition Theory (Brown, 2016, 2021) attempts to account for important aspects of autobiographical memory in a way that emphasizes the structure of experience, rather than the relation between personal-event memories and the Self. This article provides the rationale for adopting this minimalist stance. Here it is argued that: (a) an all-inclusive notion of the Self is of little utility to the study of autobiographical memory because virtually all sentient goal-directed activities can be seen as reflecting the Self, hence, adopting this view provides no bias for predicting event memorability; (b) although some event memories are clearly Self-relevant (e.g., life-story events, turning points, self-defining memories), most are not; (c) the formation of and access to Self-knowledge typically does not depend on the availability of specific autobiographical memories; rather, (d) Self-knowledge is generally derived from massive amounts of readily forgotten role-relevant experience. This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Representation Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief Psychology > Memory.

When does a wedding mark the beginning of a new chapter in one's life?

Life story chapters may be formed in relation to substantial and enduring changes in material circumstances, and we explored this idea by capitalizing on naturally occurring variations in the change of material circumstances associated with marriage. In two studies, we asked participants to report whether they cohabitated before marriage and whether they relocated in connection with marriage, using these as proxies for material change. Participants described their wedding and rated it on memory characteristics along with scales measuring material change, psychological change, and centrality to identity. Next, they identified chapters within the romantic domain of their lives. Finally, they placed the wedding memory in a chapter and marked the temporal location of the memory on a timeline representing the chapter. In study 2, not cohabitating before marriage was associated with greater likelihood of locating the wedding memory as a starting point for a chapter. The results provide some support for the role of material change in shaping the formation of chapters.

Dorsal CA1 hippocampal place cells form a multi-scale representation of megaspace

Spatially firing "place cells" within the hippocampal CA1 region form internal maps of the environment necessary for navigation and memory. In rodents, these neurons have been almost exclusively studied in small environments (<4 m²). It remains unclear how place cells encode a very large open 2D environment that is commensurate with the natural environments experienced by rodents and other mammals. Such an ethologically realistic environment would require a complex spatial representation, capable of simultaneously representing space at multiple overlapping fine-to-coarse informational scales. Here, we show that in a "megaspace" (18.6 m²), the majority of dorsal CA1 place cells exhibited multiple place subfields of different sizes, akin to those observed along the septo-temporal axis. Furthermore, the total area covered by the subfields of each cell was not correlated with the number of subfields, and increased with the scale of the environment. The multiple different-sized subfields exhibited by place cells in the megaspace suggest that the ensemble population of subfields form a multi-scale representation of space within the dorsal hippocampus. Our findings point to a new dorsal hippocampus ensemble coding scheme that simultaneously supports navigational processes at both fine- and coarse-grained resolutions. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Storying the Past and the Future: Agency and Communion Themes Among Individuals With Schizophrenia and Depression

ABSTRACT

Research has linked disturbances in narrative identity with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. One such disturbance is diminished agency and communion themes in past life stories. However, projecting oneself into the future is also central to identity and potentially impacts recovery. Hence, we examined themes of agency and communion in both past and future life stories and related themes to psychosocial functioning in 20 individuals with schizophrenia, 20 individuals with depressive disorder, and 19 nonpsychiatric controls. Participants were asked to describe up to 10 past and future chapters in their life stories and were assessed on psychosocial functioning and neurocognition. Chapters were coded for agency and communion themes. Both clinical groups displayed diminished agency and communion themes in past but not future life story chapters compared with the nonpsychiatric controls. Furthermore, agency themes in future chapters explained variance in psychosocial functioning after controlling for neurocognition. The results suggest that constructing a narrative identity to foster agency and communion in both past and future chapters may be an important part of recovering from schizophrenia and depression.

The possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the contents and organization of autobiographical memory: A Transition-Theory perspective

The COVID-19 Pandemic is unique in its near universal scope and in the way that it has changed our lives. These facts suggest that it might also be unique in its effects on memory. A framework outlined in this article, Transition Theory, is used to explicate the mnemonically relevant ways in which the onset of the Pandemic differs from other personal and collective transitions and how the Pandemic Period might differ from other personally-defined and historically-defined autobiographical periods. Transition Theory also provides the basis for several predictions. Specifically, it predicts (a) a COVID bump (an increase in availability of event memories at the outset of the Pandemic) followed by (b) a lockdown dip (a decrease in availability of event memories from lockdown periods compared to other stable periods). It also predicts that (c) people may consider the Pandemic an important chapter in their life stories, but only when there is little continuity between their pre-Pandemic and post-Pandemic lives. Time will tell whether these predictions pan out. However, it is not too soon to highlight those aspects of the COVID-19 Pandemic that are likely to shape our personal and collective memories of this very unusual historical period.

Spontaneous and deliberate future thinking: a dual process account

In this article, we address an apparent paradox in the literature on mental time travel and mind-wandering: How is it possible that future thinking is both constructive, yet often experienced as occurring spontaneously? We identify and describe two 'routes' whereby episodic future thoughts are brought to consciousness, with each of the 'routes' being associated with separable cognitive processes and functions. Voluntary future thinking relies on controlled, deliberate and slow cognitive processing. The other, termed involuntary or spontaneous future thinking, relies on automatic processes that allows 'fully-fledged' episodic future thoughts to freely come to mind, often triggered by internal or external cues. To unravel the paradox, we propose that the majority of spontaneous future thoughts are 'pre-made' (i.e., each spontaneous future thought is a re-iteration of a previously constructed future event), and therefore based on simple, well-understood, memory processes. We also propose that the pre-made hypothesis explains why spontaneous future thoughts occur rapidly, are similar to involuntary memories, and predominantly about upcoming tasks and goals. We also raise the possibility that spontaneous future thinking is the default mode of imagining the future. This dual process approach complements and extends standard theoretical approaches that emphasise constructive simulation, and outlines novel opportunities for researchers examining voluntary and spontaneous forms of future thinking.

Narrative Identity in Psychopathology: A Negative Past and a Bright but Foreshortened Future

We examined narrative identity as a possible transdiagnostic marker of psychopathology by interviewing individuals with schizophrenia, individuals with depression and a nonclinical control group about past and future chapters in their life stories. Participants were 20 patients with schizophrenia, 20 patients with depression, and 20 nonclinical control participants matched on age, gender, and education. Participants described up to 10 chapters in their past and future life stories and self-rated chapters on emotional tone and self-event connections. In addition, cognitive function and current levels of symptoms was assessed. Both patient groups self-rated their past chapters as more negative and less positive compared to the control group, but did not differ from each other. There were no group differences in positivity of future chapters, but both patient groups identified fewer future chapters with shorter temporal projections. The results are consistent with the notion that negative past aspects of narrative identity are a transdiagnostic marker of psychopathology, while also suggesting that individuals with mental illness construct a positive future, which may support hope.

Functions of spontaneous and voluntary future thinking: evidence from subjective ratings

Future thinking is defined as the ability to withdraw from reality and mentally project oneself into the future. The primary aim of the present study was to examine whether functions of future thoughts differed depending on their mode of elicitation (spontaneous or voluntary) and an attribute of goal-relatedness (selected-goal-related or selected-goal-unrelated). After producing spontaneous and voluntary future thoughts in a laboratory paradigm, participants provided ratings on four proposed functions of future thinking (self, directive, social, and emotional regulation). Findings showed that spontaneous and voluntary future thoughts were rated similarly on all functions except the directive function, which was particularly relevant to spontaneous future thoughts. Future thoughts classed as goal-related (selected-goal-related) were rated higher across all functions, and there was largely no interaction between mode of elicitation and goal-relatedness. A higher proportion of spontaneous future thoughts were selected-goal-related compared with voluntary future thoughts. In general, these results indicate that future thinking has significant roles across affective, behavioural, self and social functions, and supports theoretical views that implicate spontaneous future thought in goal-directed cognition and behaviour.

Scrutinizing the grey areas of declarative memory: Do the self-reference and temporal orientation of a trait knowledge task modulate the Late Positive Component (LPC)?

Knowledge about the future self may engage cognitive processes typically ascribed to episodic memory, such as awareness of the future self as an extension of the current self (i.e., autonoetic awareness) and the construction of future events. In a prior study (Tanguay et al., 2018), temporal orientation influenced the Late Positive Component (LPC), an ERP correlate of recollection. The LPC amplitude for present traits was intermediate between semantic and episodic memory, whereas thinking about one's future traits produced a larger LPC amplitude that was similar to episodic memory. Here, we examined further the effect of temporal orientation on the LPC amplitude and investigated if it was influenced by whether knowledge concerns the self or another person, with the proximity of the other being considered. Participants verified whether traits (e.g., Enthusiastic) were true of themselves and the "other," both now and in the future. Proximity of the other person was manipulated between subjects, such that participants either thought about the typical traits of a close friend (n = 31), or those of their age group more broadly (n = 35). Self-reference and temporal orientation interacted: The LPC amplitude for future knowledge was larger than for present knowledge, but only for the self. This effect of temporal orientation was not observed when participants thought about the traits of other people. The proximity of the other person did not modify these effects. Future-oriented cognition can engage different cognitive processes depending on self-reference; knowledge about the personal future increased the LPC amplitude unlike thinking about the future of other people. Our findings strengthen the notion of self-knowledge as a grey area between semantic and episodic memory.

Zooming In and Out on One's Life: Autobiographical Representations at Multiple Time Scales

The ability to decouple from the present environment and explore other times is a central feature of the human mind. Research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience has shown that the personal past and future is represented at multiple timescales and levels of resolution, from broad lifetime periods that span years to short-time slices of experience that span seconds. Here, I review this evidence and propose a theoretical framework for understanding mental time travel as the capacity to flexibly navigate hierarchical layers of autobiographical representations. On this view, past and future thoughts rely on two main systems-event simulation and autobiographical knowledge-that allow us to represent experiential contents that are decoupled from sensory input and to place these on a personal timeline scaffolded from conceptual knowledge of the content and structure of our life. The neural basis of this cognitive architecture is discussed, emphasizing the possible role of the medial pFC in integrating layers of autobiographical representations in the service of mental time travel.

Temporal processing of past and future autobiographical events in patients with schizophrenia

People with schizophrenia experience difficulties in remembering their past and envisioning their future. However, while alterations of event representation are well documented, little is known about how personal events are located and ordered in time. Using a think-aloud procedure, we investigated which strategies are used to determine the times of past and future events in 30 patients with schizophrenia and 30 control participants. We found that the direct access to temporal information of important events was preserved in patients with schizophrenia. However, when events were not directly located in time, patients less frequently used a combination of strategies and partly relied on different strategies to reconstruct or infer the times of past and future events. In particular, they used temporal landmark events and contextual details (e.g., about places, persons, or weather conditions) less frequently than controls to locate events in time. Furthermore, patients made more errors when they were asked to determine the temporal order of the past and future events that had been previously dated. Together, these findings shed new light on the mechanisms involved in locating and ordering personal events in past and future times and their alteration in schizophrenia.

The sequencing process generated by the cerebellum crucially contributes to social interactions

The capacity to understand another person's emotions, intentions, beliefs and personality traits, based on observed or communicated behaviors, is termed social cognition. During the last decade, social neuroscience has made great progress in understanding the neural correlates of social cognition. However, because the cerebellum is traditionally viewed as only involved in motor processing, the contribution of this major part of the brain in social processing has been largely ignored and its specific role in social cognition remains unclear. Nevertheless, recent meta-analyses have made its crucial contribution to social cognition evident. This raises the question: What is the exact function of the cerebellum in social cognition? We hypothesize that the cerebellum builds internal action models of our social inter-actions to predict how other people's actions will be executed, what our most likely responses are to these actions, so that we can automatize our interactions and instantly detect disruptions in these action sequences. This mechanism likely allows to better anticipate action sequences during social interactions in an automatic and intuitive way and to fine-tune these anticipations, making it easier to understand behaviors and to detect violations. This hypothesis has major implications in neurological disorders affecting the cerebellum such as autism, with detrimental effects on social functionality, especially on more complex and abstract social cognitive processes. Because the fundamental anatomical organization of the cerebellum is identical in many species (cerebellar microcomplexes), this hypothesis could have major impacts to elucidate social interactions in social animals.

Personal and parents' life stories in patients with borderline personality disorder

Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) display disturbances in understanding self and others. We examined whether these disturbances extended to how patients described their personal and parents' life stories and to measures of identity, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Thirty BPD patients and 30 matched control participants described personal and parents' life stories and completed measures of identity disturbance, alexithymia, empathy, and emotional intelligence. Compared to the controls, patients with BPD described their personal and their parents' life stories more negatively and with fewer themes of agency and communion fulfillment. Patients and controls showed equally complex reasoning about their personal life stories, but patients displayed less complexity and more self-other confusion, when reasoning about their parents' stories. Patients also differed from controls on identity disturbance, alexithymia, and empathy. The results suggest that patients' storied understanding of themselves and others are disturbed and should be taken into account to better understand BPD.

Life Narratives Are More Other-Centered, More Negative, and Less Coherent in Turkey Than in Germany: Comparing Provincial-Turkish, Metropolitan-Turkish, Turkish-German, and Native German Educated Young Adults

An individualized and coherent life story has been described as the form of identity that is required by highly mobile individualistic Western societies, whereas more family-oriented, traditional societies require more role-based, synchronic identities. Therefore in individualistic cultures entire life narratives can be expected to be more coherent and to contain more autobiographical arguments that contribute to life narrative coherence. This cultural group difference is expected to be mediated by individuals’ conformity to their respective cultural normative concept of biography, such that more conformity leads to less life narrative coherence and fewer autobiographical arguments. We tested these expectations by eliciting entire life narratives and cultural life scripts from four different cultural groups of students of technical universities: from provincial Karabük and from metropolitan Istanbul in Turkey, as well as from students with a Turkish migrant and with a native German background from urban Frankfurt am Main, Germany (N = 96). Expectations were confirmed for global life narrative coherence and autobiographical arguments with self-event connections. Conformity with a normative concept of biography indeed partially mediated cultural influences on life narrative coherence. Life narratives from Turkey also contained more family-related events and, unexpectedly, were more negative. Thus creating a coherent life narrative is more typical for cultures that require autonomous, individualized selves rather than for cultures requiring more related selves, reflecting the life story’s suitability for expressing individualized identities and its lesser suitability for expressing interdependent identities.

Envisioning the times of future events: The role of personal goals

Episodic future thinking refers to the human capacity to imagine or simulate events that might occur in one's personal future. Previous studies have shown that personal goals guide the construction and organization of episodic future thoughts, and here we sought to investigate the role of personal goals in the process of locating imagined events in time. Using a think-aloud protocol, we found that dates were directly accessed more frequently for goal-related than goal-unrelated future events, and the goal-relevance of events was a significant predictor of direct access to temporal information on a trial-by-trial basis. Furthermore, when an event was not directly dated, references to anticipated lifetime periods were more frequently used as a strategy to determine when a goal-related event might occur. Together, these findings shed new light on the mechanisms by which personal goals contribute to the location of imagined events in future times.

Functions of personal and vicarious life stories: identity and empathy

The present study investigates functions of personal and vicarious life stories focusing on identity and empathy. Two-hundred-and-forty Danish high school students completed two life story questionnaires: one for their personal life story and one for a close other's life story. In both questionnaires, they identified up to 10 chapters and self-rated the chapters on valence and valence of causal connections. In addition, they completed measures of identity disturbance and empathy. More positive personal life stories were related to lower identity disturbance and higher empathy. Vicarious life stories showed a similar pattern with respect to identity but surprisingly were unrelated to empathy. In addition, we found positive correlations between personal and vicarious life stories for number of chapters, chapter valence, and valence of causal connections. The study indicates that both personal and vicarious life stories may contribute to identity.

Self-Event Connections in Life Stories, Self-Concept Clarity, and Dissociation: Examining Their Relations with Symptoms of Psychopathology

Constructing a coherent life story through the formation of self-event connections may help maintain unity in the self. We examined how positive and negative self-event connections were related to symptoms of psychopathology when controlling for two other measures of self-unity: self-concept clarity and dissociation. While most studies of life stories use content coding, we used a self-report method and hence provide a rationale for this method. One hundred five young adults identified life story chapters and rated them on self-event connections, including questions of positive or negative self-change and self-stability connections. They also completed scales measuring self-concept clarity, dissociation, and symptoms. Higher ratings of positive and lower ratings of negative self-event connections in life stories were related to fewer symptoms of psychopathology. Positive self-change was related to fewer symptoms when controlling for self-concept clarity and dissociation. The results suggest that positive and negative self-event connections are differentially related to symptoms of psychopathology. In addition, the results indicate that self-report measures of life stories may be a useful supplement to coding of narratives.

Reconstructing the times of past and future personal events

Humans have the remarkable ability to mentally travel through past and future times. However, while memory for the times of past events has been much investigated, little is known about how imagined future events are temporally located. Using a think-aloud protocol, we found that the temporal location of past and future events is rarely directly accessed, but instead mostly relies on reconstructive and inferential strategies. References to lifetime periods and factual knowledge (about the self, others, and the world) were most frequently used to determine the temporal location of both past and future events. Event details (e.g., places, persons, or weather conditions) were also used, but mainly for past events. Finally, the results showed that events whose temporal location was directly accessed were judged more important for personal goals. Together, these findings shed new light on the mechanisms involved in locating personal events in past and future times.

The life stories of adults with amnesia: Insights into the contribution of the medial temporal lobes to the organization of autobiographical memory

Autobiographical memories are not stored in isolation but rather are organized into life chapters, higher-order knowledge structures that represent major themes conveying the arc of one's life. Neuropsychological studies have revealed that both episodic memory and some aspects of personal semantic memory are impaired in adults with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage. However, whether such impairment compromises the retrieval and formation of life chapters is unknown. Therefore, we had 10 adults with MTL amnesia and 20 control participants narrate their life stories, and we extracted life chapters from these narratives using a novel scoring protocol. For the retrograde and anterograde time period separately, we evaluated the number of life chapters and assessed their quality, as indexed by measures of complexity and richness. Additionally, to investigate the idea that formation of life chapters occurs on a protracted time scale, we separated the amnesic participants into an early-life and a later-life onset subgroup. Results revealed that early-onset, but not later-onset, amnesic participants generated fewer retrograde life chapters than controls. The higher-order temporal relation among retrograde chapters, but not their thematic relation or the richness of individual life chapters, was impaired in both amnesic subgroups. The amnesic participants also generated fewer anterograde life chapters than controls, and the richness of their anterograde chapters was reduced in terms of content, but not self-reflection. Findings suggest that the organization of autobiographical content into life chapters is a protracted process that depends on the MTL, as does retrieval of higher order temporal relations among life chapters.

The role of personal goals in autonoetic experience when imagining future events

Although autonoetic experience-a sense of mental time travel-has been considered as the hallmark of episodic future thinking, what determines this subjective feeling is not yet fully understood. Here, we investigated the role of autobiographical knowledge by manipulating the relevance of imagined events for personal goals. Participants were asked to imagine three types of events (goal-related future events, experimenter-provided future events, and atemporal events) and to assess various characteristics of their mental representations. The results showed that the three types of events were represented with similar levels of detail and vividness. Importantly, however, goal-related future events were associated with a stronger autonoetic experience. Furthermore, autonoetic experience was significantly predicted by the importance of imagined events for personal goals. These findings suggest that the subjective feeling of pre-experiencing one's personal future in part depends on the extent to which imagined events can be placed in an autobiographical context.

Neural correlates of event clusters in past and future thoughts: How the brain integrates specific episodes with autobiographical knowledge

When remembering the past or envisioning the future, events often come to mind in organized sequences or stories rather than in isolation from one another. The aim of the present fMRI study was to investigate the neural correlates of such event clusters. Participants were asked to consider pairs of specific past or future events: in one condition, the two events were part of the same event cluster (i.e., they were thematically and/or causally related to each other), whereas in another condition the two events only shared a surface feature (i.e., their location); a third condition was also included, in which the two events were unrelated to each other. The results showed that the processing of past and future events that were part of a same cluster was associated with higher activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC), rostrolateral PFC, and left lateral temporal and parietal regions, compared to the two other conditions. Furthermore, functional connectivity analyses revealed an increased coupling between these cortical regions. These findings suggest that largely similar processes are involved in organizing events in clusters for the past and the future. The medial and rostrolateral PFC might play a pivotal role in mediating the integration of specific events with conceptual autobiographical knowledge 'stored' in more posterior regions. Through this integrative process, this set of brain regions might contribute to the attribution of an overarching meaning to representations of specific past and future events, by contextualizing them with respect to personal goals and general knowledge about one's life story.