Working Memory Capacity For Dynamic Events: The Effects Of Event Number And Duration - Info and Reading Options

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Humans are endowed with the fascinating ability to mentally travel in time. This faculty allows them, among other things, to mentally relive episodes from their personal past (D’Argembeau, 2020). However, remembering an event is not like replaying a continuous video recording but instead involves a sequence of experience units (EUs)—each unit representing a moment of the past experience—that are separated by temporal discontinuities (i.e., moments that are not remembered) (D’Argembeau et al., 2022). Because of these discontinuities, the time taken to mentally re-experience everyday activities is typically shorter than their actual duration, a phenomenon referred to as the temporal compression of events in episodic memory (Jeunehomme et al., 2018; Jeunehomme & D’Argembeau, 2019). However, the cognitive mechanisms leading to this structure of episodic memories are not fully understood, especially factors that explain temporal discontinuities. A consistent body of work suggests that EUs are formed through cognitive processing taking place during event perception. In daily life, we constantly segment the continuous flow of experience into meaningful units (i.e., events) that are temporally delimited by the perception of event boundaries (i.e., the end of an event and the beginning of another) (Kurby & Zacks, 2008; Radvansky & Zacks, 2017; Zacks, 2020). Between event boundaries, working memory enables us to construct and maintain a mental model of the current situation (i.e., an event model) while continuously processing incoming information (Loschky et al., 2020; Radvansky & Zacks, 2017; Trapp et al., 2021). When the situation changes (i.e., when an event boundary is perceived), the current event model is updated and its previous version is integrated in the long-term memory representation of the ongoing sequence of events (Bird, 2020). Based on this work on event segmentation, we suggest that temporal discontinuities within episodic memories is a byproduct of the role of working memory in constructing event models. When new information needs to be continuously processed, working memory capacity is temporally limited: without rehearsal, the information just perceived is only maintained for a limited amount of time (Barrouillet et al., 2004). So, in the context of event model formation, the capacity limit of working memory (i.e., the time during which information can be held in working memory without active rehearsal) should correspond to the maximal duration of an event model that can be fully maintained in mind. When this temporal capacity is exceeded before the perception of an event boundary, the EU formed at the end of the current event would only partially represent its unfolding. It follows that temporal discontinuities in long-term memory representations of past experience should depend on the number of events they integrate and their actual duration. The present study aims to test this hypothesis by examining how the number and duration of events to remember influence mental replay time. To address this question, we will measure the time taken by participants to mentally replay short movies depicting 1, 2, or 3 events (without event boundaries), each lasting 3, 6, 9, or 12 seconds.

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