Schedule of Events | Search Abstracts | Invited Symposia | Symposia | Poster Sessions | Data Blitz

Shifting Perspectives: The Time Course of Visual Perspective Change in Autobiographical Memory

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Nilay Özdemir Haksever¹ (), Peggy L. St. Jacques¹; ¹University of Alberta

Autobiographical memories enable us to recreate past events but are inherently reconstructive and prone to change. Although events are initially experienced from our own eyes, memories can be later retrieved from an alternative, observer-like perspective in which people can “see” themselves within their mental imagery. These shifts in visual perspective may reflect how memories are consolidated and transformed over time, yet the timing of this effect remains unclear. We investigated how visual perspective changes as a function of memory remoteness. Participants selected and dated over 200 autobiographical memories from the past five years and provided subjective ratings of own eyes and observer perspectives. This approach allowed us to model how memory age (in days) predicts perspective ratings with high temporal precision using mixed-effects models. Consistent with prior work, observer ratings increased with memory age. Novel results, obtained using a log-linear mixed-effects model, indicated that perspective shifts occur rapidly at first and then attenuate with time. To further capture potential nonlinearities and identify when change stabilizes, we fitted a Generalized Additive Mixed Model (GAMM). Results revealed a rapid early shift within days, followed by a later plateau for both own eyes and observer memory perspectives. These findings characterize the temporal trajectory of perspective transformation in autobiographical memory, providing the first fine-grained behavioral evidence for when memories are most susceptible to change. The observed pattern parallels consolidation accounts involving rapid early transformation followed by relative stabilization over time.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic