ArticleMemory & cognition2022
Narratives bridge the divide between distant events in episodic memory.
Article in Memory & cognition, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Context-dependent abstraction of temporal relationships during naturalistic episodic memory.iScience · 2026Article
- Cortical reinstatement of causally related events sparks narrative insights by updating neural representation patterns.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Interactive narratives reveal the personalizing effect of agency on episodic memory.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Narrative coherence warps the timeline of recalled naturalistic events.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2026Article
- Aging shifts recall of naturalistic events from temporal to topic organization.Psychology and aging · 2026Article
- The temporal organization of memory and emotion is reciprocally coupled.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- A Scoping Review on Conversational Memory and Characteristics of Conversations in Alzheimer's Disease.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2025Article
- The effects of narrative framing of own broken love on understanding the past and imagining the future in close relationships.PloS one · 2025Article
- Navigating decision space: Causal structure improves performance in a branching choice task.PloS one · 2025Article
- EPS mid-career prize: An integrated framework for the learning, recognition and interpretation of words.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2024Review
- Causal and Chronological Relationships Predict Memory Organization for Nonlinear Narratives.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2024Article
- Neural Activity Differentiates Novel and Learned Event Boundaries.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Article
- Narrative as active inference: an integrative account of cognitive and social functions in adaptation.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Narrative Memories Woven by an Intertextual Hippocampus.Journal of comparative literature & aesthetics · 2024Article
- Flexible reuse of cortico-hippocampal representations during encoding and recall of naturalistic events.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Aging impacts memory for perceptual, but not narrative, event details.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Stress disrupts insight-driven mnemonic reconfiguration in the medial temporal lobe.NeuroImage · 2023Article
- Narrative-based autobiographical memory interventions for PTSD: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- An Adaptive Motivation Approach to Understanding the 'How' and 'Why' of Wellbeing.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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Abstract
Many studies suggest that information about past experience, or episodic memory, is divided into discrete units called "events." Yet we can often remember experiences that span multiple events. Events that occur in close succession might simply be linked because of their proximity to one another, but we can also build links between events that occur farther apart in time. Intuitively, some kind of organizing principle should enable temporally distant events to become bridged in memory. We tested the hypothesis that episodic memory exhibits a narrative-level organization, enabling temporally distant events to be better remembered if they form a coherent narrative. Furthermore, we tested whether post-encoding memory consolidation is necessary to integrate temporally distant events. In three experiments, participants learned and subsequently recalled events from fictional stories, in which pairs of temporally distant events involving side characters ("sideplots") either formed one coherent narrative or two unrelated narratives. Across participants, we varied whether recall was assessed immediately after learning, or after a delay: 24 hours, 12 hours between morning and evening ("wake"), or 12 hours between evening and morning ("sleep"). Participants recalled more information about coherent than unrelated narrative events, in most delay conditions, including immediate recall and wake conditions, suggesting that post-encoding consolidation was not necessary to integrate temporally distant events into a larger narrative. Furthermore, post hoc modeling across experiments suggested that narrative coherence facilitated recall over and above any effects of sentence-level semantic similarity. This reliable memory benefit for coherent narrative events supports theoretical accounts which propose that narratives provide a high-level architecture for episodic memory.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.