Selective effects of specificity inductions on episodic details: evidence for an event construction account

Abstract

ABSTRACTPrior research has suggested that an episodic specificity induction – brief training in recollecting the details of a past event – affects downstream performance on remembering past and imagining future events, solving problems, and thinking creatively. We have hypothesised that a process common to these tasks that the induction may target is event construction – assembling and maintaining a mental scenario filled with details related to settings, people, and actions. We test this hypothesis by having participants receive a memory specificity induction, imagination specificity induction, or control induction not requiring event construction prior to memory and imagination tasks that involve event construction, and a picture description task that involves describing but not mentally constructing an event. We predicted that induction effects would be specific to episodic detail production on subsequent memory and imagination because these details assay critical elements of a constructed event. In line with an event construction account, the two specificity inductions produced significant and indistinguishable increases in the number of episodic – but not semantic – details generated during memory and imagination relative to the control. Induction did not increase detail generation on picture description. The findings provide novel evidence that event construction is a key process targeted by specificity inductions.