Temporal (a)symmetries in cued recall of naturalistic events

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Xinming Xu¹ (xinming.xu.gr@dartmouth.edu), Jeremy R. Manning¹; ¹Dartmouth College

Episodic memory involves retrieving the context associated with past experiences. How does retrieved context facilitate recall of nearby events? Prior studies using random (temporally unstructured) word lists have demonstrated a forward advantage in cued recall, whereby a cued item facilitates recall of the subsequent item more strongly than the preceding item. In this study, we ask whether cued recalls of events from structured naturalistic sequences like movie narratives (which contain complex networks of meaningful forward and backward associations) show similar forward asymmetries. We ask participants to watch 30-min-long movies. Afterwards, we cue them with short clips from the just-watched movie and ask them to either recall what happened immediately before or immediately after the cued clip. A subset of cues are selected either immediately before or immediately after scene boundaries in the movie. First, we aim to replicate the finding from prior work that cued-recall performance is lower with across-event cues than that with within-event cues. We then plan to compare cued recall performance in the forward versus backward directions. If cued recall of naturalistic events is similar to that of random word lists, then we anticipate a forward asymmetry in participants’ cued recalls. Alternatively, if other factors that are specific to naturalistic experiences play a role, then we might instead observe symmetric cued recall performance or even a backward advantage.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic