ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4116-8497
Date of Award
Spring 5-10-2024
Degree Name
Master of Arts (AM/MA)
Degree Type
Thesis
Abstract
As people go through everyday life, they segment their continuous sensory experience into distinct events, and the event structure being perceived during encoding has important implication on how event dynamics is later reconstructed from long-term memory. Previous studies using discrete pictorial stimuli showed that people are sometimes better at remembering the temporal order of items occurring within the same perceptual context than items spanning across a perceptual boundary, but that the opposite can also occur if contextual cues are available during retrieval. However, given that these paradigms only tested the episodic memory of arbitrary temporal associations, it is unclear if the conclusions can be generalized to everyday scenarios that rely heavily on structured event knowledge for perception and memory. In the current study, we developed a set of hierarchically organized narrative stimuli describing everyday events, with semantic order constraints among events either on the coarse-level or on the fine-level. In Experiment 1 and 2, we found that within-event temporal order memory was improved when fine-level semantic constraints were provided, and across-event temporal order memory was improved when coarse-level semantic constraints were provided. We observed these effects after both a shorter (2.5-minute) and a longer (20-minute) delay, which demonstrated that participants could use semantic order constraints on either coarse- or fine-level to facilitate temporal order reconstruction. In Experiment 3, we tested serial recall of the narratives and found that participants frequently chucked their recall based on coarse-level event membership. Together, these results suggested that temporal order memory of everyday events should be primarily viewed as a reconstruction process that utilizes multiple sources of information apart from episodic memory.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Dr. Jeffrey Zacks
Committee Members
Dr. Ian Dobbins, Dr. Zachariah Reagh
Recommended Citation
Ding, Yining, "Temporal Order Memory in Naturalistic Events Is Influenced by Semantic Knowledge and Hierarchical Event Structure" (2024). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3096.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3096