Schedule of Events | Symposia

Episodic and semantic memory contributions to imagination and creativity: Insights from eye-tracking

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

Preston Thakral¹ (pthakral@smith.edu), Kevin Madore², Aleea Devitt³; ¹Smith College, ²Lumos Labs (Lumosity), ³University of Waikato

The ability to generate novel creative ideas (divergent thinking) is closely linked with our ability to imagine novel future events (episodic simulation). Here, we employed an individual differences approach to examine whether divergent thinking and episodic simulation are differentially associated with the ability to retrieve episodic and semantic memory content. In response to object word cues, participants generated meanings and definitions (semantic memory), remembered a past event (episodic memory), imagined a novel future event (episodic simulation), or generated novel uses (divergent thinking). We monitored eye-movements during these tasks to gain insight into the mnemonic processes that might link these four abilities. Replicating previous findings, divergent thinking ability was predicted by the number of episodic details generated during episodic simulation, but not the number of episodic details generated during episodic memory. When directly comparing episodic and semantic memory, the strongest predictor of divergent thinking was semantic memory. However, episodic details during episodic simulation were predicted by the amount of details during both episodic and semantic memory. These behavioral findings indicate that during divergent thinking, retrieval is weighed more towards semantic relative to episodic memorial content. Episodic simulation, however, is associated with a relative equal balance of episodic and semantic memorial content. When examining eye-movements, pupil dilation tracked divergent thinking ability and the number of episodic details during episodic memory and simulation, but not semantic memory. These findings suggest that examining pupillometry is a promising direction for future research as it can identify common episodic processes not visible with behavior alone.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic