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Cueing with key moments to facilitate recall of narratives

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Aditya Upadhyayula¹ (), Zachariah Reagh¹; ¹Washington University in St. Louis

Continuous experiences are represented and remembered as discrete events. While a great deal of research has focused on the influence of boundaries between events, recent work from our group suggests that people also reliably identify Key Moments (KMs) within events. These key moments – which are somewhat distinct from event boundaries – elicit synchronized neural responses across individuals, and are preferentially reinstated during memory retrieval. In the present study, we tested whether recall is facilitated when memory cues correspond to these KMs. In this ongoing fMRI experiment, participants watch two short films (Mr. Bean’s Holiday and This Time Away), and after a delay, are presented with six image snapshots drawn either from peaks (KMs) or troughs (random moments) of a previously derived KM distribution obtained from an independent sample. For each snapshot set, participants freely recall the portion of the story it depicted and rated the helpfulness of the images (1–100 scale). In a pilot sample, 23 participants rated KM snapshots as significantly more helpful than random ones (p < 0.001) for anchoring recall, indicating that KMs serve as subjectively effective cues for reconstructing event narratives from memory. In the in-progress fMRI sample, we predict that KMs as cues will facilitate rubric-scored memory accuracy, and will enhance reinstatement of neural patterns during encoding of individual events as those events are recalled.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic