Causality and agency in memory for natural events

What will you remember from this day? Some details and moments of our experiences are forgotten or never encoded, while others are retained in memory for minutes, days, or even years. I will first describe experiments showing how the causal and semantic structure of experiences -- the network of causal and semantic connections between events in audiovisual movies -- predicts what we remember later, and how this structure is recapitulated during narrated recall. In the brain, hippocampal responses increase when event connections become more dense, and representations in default mode network areas synchronize across individuals during recall of these moments. Next, I will show how causal and semantic structure's impact on memory changes when participants have agency, that is, when they choose their own path through an interactive story. Our results demonstrate that agency enhances idiosyncrasy in which details are later recalled, reduces the ability of NLP-derived semantic structure to predict memory, and increases clustering of recalled events; all three phenomena may reflect a "personalization" of semantic space when individuals have decision power over their own experience. Together, these studies reveal how event network structure and agency guide the flow of our ongoing experiences, shaping what and how we remember.

Dr. Janice Chen is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. William Hodos NACS Seminars are free and open to the public.