Separating Past and Future Autobiographical Events in Memory: Evidence for a Reality Monitoring Asymmetry

McDonough, Ian M., Gallo, David A., Memory & Cognition

After thinking about the past and imagining the future, how do people separate these real and imagined events in memory? We had subjects engage in past and future autobiographical elaboration, then later take memory tests that required them to recollect these earlier generated events. In Experiment 1, testing memory for previously generated past or future autobiographical events led to fewer source memory confusions than did an elaborative control task, suggesting that the distinctive features of autobiographical elaboration improved subsequent retrieval monitoring accuracy. In Experiment 2, we directly compared retrieval monitoring accuracy for previously generated past and future …

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Publication information: Article title: Separating Past and Future Autobiographical Events in Memory: Evidence for a Reality Monitoring Asymmetry. Contributors: McDonough, Ian M. - Author, Gallo, David A. - Author. Journal title: Memory & Cognition. Volume: 38. Issue: 1 Publication date: January 2010. Page number: 3+. © Psychonomic Society, Inc. Dec 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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