Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Temporal Distortions During Narrative Recall

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Nathaniel Allen¹ (nallen25@jh.edu), Chris Honey¹, Janice Chen¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University

Estimating and reasoning about time is crucial to understanding our complex and dynamic world. When we estimate how long our friend has taken running errands, or how long we’ve waited for our food to cool, we reason about time on the scale of minutes. Many situations can alter our perception of time in disorienting or surprising ways. We have observed a powerful bias in human time estimation on the scale of minutes during recall. As people gradually recall and describe the scenes of a recently viewed movie, they dramatically underestimate how much time they spent recalling. What causes such dramatic degradations in people’s ability to estimate elapsed time? Our hypothesis is that regions responsible for tracking shifting mental context through time are also involved in the reinstatement of those prior mental contexts; thus, when these neural systems are engaged in a demanding reinstatement task like narrative recall, this interferes with their ability to track the passage of time. In a developing study, we will present participants with a 50 minute movie, after which they will either engage in spoken recall of the movie or read series of unrelated sentences aloud for a length of time yoked to a participant in the recall condition. We predict participants engaged in recall will significantly underestimate elapsed time compared both to veridical time and the estimates made by control participants, behaviorally reflecting the hypothesized neural interference within regions that participate in memory reinstatement, such as the default mode network and medial temporal lobe cortex.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic