Scrambled Narratives and Changes in Memory Composition Over Time

Abstract

Event memories consist of both episodic and schematic contributions. Typically, episodic details are more susceptible to forgetting than schematic details, resulting in memories becoming less episodic and more schematic over time. This thesis presents a novel paradigm to efficiently quantify changes in episodic and schematic contributions to retrieval over time. Participants (N = 201) read a short story with the order of events randomly scrambled. After a delay (Immediate, 24-hour, 48-hour, 72-hour, 1-week), participants performed a temporal order memory test. Over longer delays, we found that participants’ memory for the scrambled story became increasingly dissimilar to the scrambled order that was originally studied (i.e., less episodic). Instead, participants’ memory increasingly resembled the never-presented coherent version of the story (i.e., more schematic). These results suggest that recall increasingly relies on prior knowledge, rendering incoherent memories more coherent with time.