The effect of retrieval goals on the content recalled from complex narratives.

Memories are not always accurately recalled, and one factor that influences memory is the goal of retrieval. Evidence suggests that retrieving a memory to fit a social goal affects the content that is recollected, yet the nature of this effect, and whether this effect remains stable over time, is not fully understood. To this end, we compared the effect of retrieving a complex event (i.e., a narrative) motivated by a social versus an accuracy goal both immediately and after a 24-hour consolidation period. Three groups of young adults encoded audio narratives and recalled these narratives immediately (Session 1) and again after a 24-hour delay (Session 2). One group recalled the narratives to meet a social goal across both sessions (social); another group recalled the narratives for an accuracy goal across both sessions (accuracy); and a final group initially recalled the narratives for a social goal (Session 1) and then for an accuracy goal (Session 2; mixed). We found no effect of group on the number of details that described the overall theme (central details); however, a social goal significantly reduced the number of specific (episodic) details and altered the order in which the details were described. When the goal of retrieval changed across session (i.e., mixed group), the reduction in specific details remained but not the effect on detail order. These results demonstrate that socially motivated memory retrieval selectively alters the specific episodic content contained in the memory, leaving intact the thematic knowledge and overall structure of the memory.

The effects of emotional valence and perceived life stress on recalling personal experiences and envisioning future events.

Although it is understood that engaging in mental time travel to remember the past and imagine the future relies on similar cognitive processes, there are important differences. Notably, there is evidence that emotional valence differently affects how past and future events are accessed. Here, we explored the differential effect of emotional valence on past and future event generation in the context of personal stress. This is based on findings that an individual's current life stress -a metric of mental health-alters emotional mental time travel. In an online experiment conducted during the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, 421 participants generated specific past and future events to a series of positive and negative cues and then rated the likelihood that the event would occur in the future, the emotion conveyed in the event, and the difficulty of generating the event. Participants also completed a questionnaire estimating current life stress. We found a general bias toward generating specific positive future events that was not present when generating past events. Additionally, we found a small but significant effect of stress levels on ratings of difficulty and likelihood for events generated in response to positive cues. These results provide new insight into how an individual's current stress selectively targets the way positive life events are perceived. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).