Emotional state dynamics impacts temporal memory

Wang, Jingyi; Lapate, Regina C.

doi:10.1101/2023.07.25.550412

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 157 publications

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“…Do the number or the kind of change present at the boundary have differential effects on the organization of information in long-term memory? Event segmentation effects in memory have been shown using various types of context shifts, including changes in perceptual features (Clewett et al, 2020;Ezzyat & Davachi, 2014;Heusser et al, 2018), task demands (DuBrow & Davachi, 2013; Y. C. Wang & Egner, 2022;Wen & Egner, 2022), linguistic narratives (Ezzyat & Davachi, 2011), spatial contexts (Brunec et al, 2018(Brunec et al, , 2020Horner et al, 2016), emotional images, auditory tones or music (Clewett & McClay, 2021;McClay et al, 2023;J. Wang & Lapate, 2023), and shifts in reward structure (Rouhani et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Goal shifts structure memories and prioritize event-defining information in long- term memory

Cowan,

Chanales,

Davachi

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Every day, we encounter far more information than we could possibly remember. Thus, our memory systems must organize and prioritize the details from an experience that can adaptively guide the storage and retrieval of specific episodic events. Prior work has shown that shifts in internal goal states can function as event boundaries, chunking experiences into distinct and memorable episodes. In addition, at short delays, memory for contextual information at boundaries has been shown to be enhanced compared to items within each event. However, it remains unclear if these memory enhancements are limited to features that signal a meaningful transition between events. To determine how changes in dynamic goal states influence the organization and content of long-term memory, we designed a two-day experiment in which participants viewed a series of black and white objects surrounded by a color border on a two-by-two grid. The location of the object on the grid determined which of two tasks participants performed on a given trial. To examine if distinct types of goal shifts modulate the effects of event segmentation, we changed the border color, the task, or both after every four items in a sequence. We found that goal shifts influenced temporal memory in a manner consistent with the formation of distinct events. However, for subjective memory representations in particular, these effects differed by the type of event boundary. Further, to examine if goal shifts lead to the prioritization of goal relevant features in long-term memory, we tested source memory for each object’s color and grid location both immediately and after a 24-hour delay. On the immediate test, boundaries enhanced memory for all concurrent source features compared to non-boundary items, but only if those boundaries involved a goal shift. In contrast, after a delay, source memory was selectively enhanced only for the feature relevant to the goal shift. These findings suggest that goals can adaptively structure memories by prioritizing contextual features that define a unique episodic memory.

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