Effects of Learned Episodic Event Structure on Prospective Duration Judgments

The field of psychology of time has typically distinguished between prospective timing and retrospective duration estimation: in prospective timing, participants attend to and encode time, whereas in retrospective estimation, estimates are based on the memory of what happened. Prior research on prospective timing has primarily focused on attentional mechanisms to explain timing behavior, but it remains unclear the extent to which memory processes may also play a role. The present studies investigate this issue, and specifically, the role of newly learned encoded event structure. Two structural properties of dynamic event sequences were examined, which are known to modulate retrospective duration estimates: the perceived number of segments and the similarity between them. We found that when duration and episodic event content are both attended to and encoded, more segments and less similarity between them led to longer attributed durations, despite clock duration remaining constant. In contrast, when only duration is attended to, only the number of segments influenced estimated durations. These findings indicate that incidentally or intentionally encoded episodic event structure modulates prospective duration judgments. Based on these and previous findings, implications for the role of memory mechanisms on prospective paradigms are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Recor

Remembering time: The role of event structure in duration representation

This thesis investigates the role of event structure in duration representation. A combination of behavioural and neuroimaging techniques was used to examine the effect of the number of perceived segments and the relative similarity between them on memory representations and estimates of duration. Behavioural studies in Chapter 2 showed that an increase in the number of perceived segments and a decrease in perceived similarity between them lead to longer estimates of duration when reconstructing duration based on a memory representation of content. Chapter 3 investigated whether representations of duration arising from language are similar to those from visual stimuli, indicating that for language, an increase in the number of segments but not the similarity between them leads to longer estimates. Chapter 4 investigated whether event structure also affects time monitoring, showing that estimated duration increases as an effect of the number of segments and dissimilarity between them when both time and content are attended to, but that only the number of coarse segments plays a role when only time is attended to. Together, these findings corroborate the idea that duration reconstruction relies on the encoded event structure, as the role of event structure is diminished when content is not remembered. However, on a coarse level, the number of event boundaries may also guide the encoding of duration. Chapter 5 investigated the neural underpinnings of duration reconstruction using fMRI, showing that activity in left hippocampus is modulated by event structure. Finally, a behavioural experiment in Chapter 6 investigated the effect of event structure on the mental reproduction of events, showing that the duration of this replay increases as an effect of more segments and less similarity between them. Together, these findings suggest that event structure affects memory representations, with more segments and less similarity between them leading to longer duration reconstructions

The impact of error-consequence severity on cue processing in importance-biased prospective memory

Prospective memory (PM) enables people to remember to complete important tasks in the future. Failing to do so can result in consequences of varying severity. Here, we investigated how PM error-consequence severity impacts the neural processing of relevant cues for triggering PM and the ramification of that processing on the associated prospective task performance. Participants role-played a cafeteria worker serving lunches to fictitious students and had to remember to deliver an alternative lunch to students (as PM cues) who would otherwise experience a moderate or severe aversive reaction. Scalp-recorded, event-related potential (ERP) measures showed that the early-latency frontal positivity, reflecting the perception-based neural responses to previously learned stimuli, did not differ between the severe versus moderate PM cues. In contrast, the longer-latency parietal positivity, thought to reflect full PM cue recognition and post retrieval processes, was elicited earlier by the severe than the moderate PM cues. This faster instantiation of the parietal positivity to the severe-consequence PM cues was then followed by faster and more accurate behavioral responses. These findings indicate how the relative importance of a PM can be neurally instantiated in the form of enhanced and faster PM cue recognition and processing and culminate into better PM

Correction: Protocol of the Healthy Brain Study:An accessible resource for understanding the human brain and how it dynamically and individually operates in its bio-social context

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260952.]

Cross-linguistic patterns in the acquisition of quantifiers.

Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here, we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier's specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for "all," "none," "some," "some…not," and "most" in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-y-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language- and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the National Academy of Sciences via http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.160134111

In search of lost time : Reconstructing the unfolding of events from memory

When remembering an event, not only do we recollect what happened, when and where it happened, but also how it unfolded over time. What aspects of events are encoded in memory to support this recollection? This question is central for understanding the nature of event memories and our reconstruction of the time passed. In this article, we investigate how the spontaneous encoding of unfamiliar animations during learning influences the recollection of how these animations unfold. Specifically, we examine two structural properties of dynamic event sequences known to modulate the amount of information encoded in memory: the perceived number of sub-events and their perceived similarity. We found that despite clock duration remaining constant, more sub-events and less similar ones led to longer recognition memory latencies, duration judgments and mental event replaying. In particular, across stimulus animations, both the perceived number of sub-events and their degree of similarity contributed to the prediction of duration judgments and the length of mental event reproductions. Results indicate that the number and nature of sub-events in a sequence modulate how we reconstruct its duration and temporal unfolding, thus suggesting that these event properties, which mediate the amount of information encoded for an event, modulate the subsequent recollection of its temporal unfolding

Different kinds of simulation during literary reading:Insights from a combined fMRI and eye-tracking study

Mental simulation is an important aspect of narrative reading. In a previous study, we found that gaze durations are differentially impacted by different kinds of mental simulation. Motor simulation, perceptual simulation, and mentalizing as elicited by literary short stories influenced eye movements in distinguishable ways (Mak & Willems, 2019). In the current study, we investigated the existence of a common neural locus for these different kinds of simulation. We additionally investigated whether individual differences during reading, as indexed by the eye movements, are reflected in domain-specific activations in the brain. We found a variety of brain areas activated by simulation-eliciting content, both modality-specific brain areas and a general simulation area. Individual variation in percent signal change in activated areas was related to measures of story appreciation as well as personal characteristics (i.e., transportability, perspective taking). Taken together, these findings suggest that mental simulation is supported by both domain-specific processes grounded in previous experiences, and by the neural mechanisms that underlie higher -order language processing (e.g., situation model building, event indexing, integration). (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

A Wandering Mind is Not Always a Creative Mind: How Thought Dynamics Explain the Relationship between Mind Wandering and Creativity

A wandering mind is not always a creative mind. Anecdotes about ideas spontaneously entering awareness during walks, showers and other off-task activities are plenty. The science behind it, however, is still inconclusive. Creativity might result from how thought context—whether thoughts are on-task or off-task—relates to thought dynamics—the manner in which thoughts unfold. While spontaneity and free movement of thoughts in particular can be linked to creativity, little is known about their relationship with mind wandering. To explore this open scientific problem, study 1 (n = 85) surveyed creative professionals about a single idea they had earlier on the day. Spontaneity of thoughts positively correlated with creativity, whereas off-task thoughts or doing something else did not. Study 2 (n = 180) tested the conjectures in a student sample during an idea generation task. The results replicated the findings from study 1, and added that free movement of thoughts also predicts originality during idea generation. The results also showed that the found correlations are limited to individual, rather than domain-wide, creativity. In all studies, the correlations between thought dynamics and creativity were no different for when people engaged in on-task or off-task thought. Given that our findings suggest that a wandering mind is not always necessarily a creative mind, understanding the mind wandering-creativity link requires further research into the causes and characteristics of spontaneous and freely moving off-task thought. Herewith, this study contributes evidence for a new emerging perspective on the relationship between mind wandering and creativity