Remembering from any angle: The flexibility of visual perspective during retrieval
Section snippets
Study 1
A novel technique was used in which participants were asked to describe the perspective accompanying each memory rather than use a Likert-type scale, as in prior studies. Ten memories were cued with events adapted from Nigro and Neisser (1983). In addition, five memories were cued with time periods, different aspects of which are reported here and elsewhere (Rice & Rubin, 2009).
Study 2
Results from Study 1 demonstrated that individuals can construct third-person perspectives from a range of locations rather than being limited to a few locations and provided preliminary evidence that the event being remembered influences third-person perspective locations. To show that these results were reliable and the differences in proportions across events were not due to random noise, we replicated the study. It was also important to replicate the results given the novelty of the
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Dorthe Berntsen, Rachel Cohen, Kathleen McDermott, Roddy Roediger, Karl Szpunar, Cindy Wooldridge, and members of the Roediger lab reading group for helpful comments, the National Institute of Mental Health (Grant Number R01 MH066079) for funding, and Karen Burns, Ricky Green, Tiffany Udoh, and other research assistants for entering and coding data. Portions of this paper were presented at the Psychonomics Conference in Houston, TX and the American Psychological Society
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2021, Consciousness and CognitionCitation Excerpt :However, as far as we are aware, there are presently no empirical data on the prevalence of this phenomenon. Additionally, there is an infinite number of spatial locations and angles from which a third-person perspective can be constructed (Callow & Roberts, 2010; Morris & Spittle, 2012), and the particular third-person vantage point from which an observer memory is retrieved relates to that memory’s content (e.g., when remembering giving a presentation, one is more likely to recall the scene from in front of oneself; Rice & Rubin, 2011). Clearly, then, third-person perspective is not just one end of a unidimensional construct but is instead a category of perspectives within which meaningful variation exists.
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2021, Consciousness and CognitionCitation Excerpt :Further, whereas “Brushing your teeth” and “Cooking a meal at home” were both experienced quite vividly on average (Ms = 6.12 and 6.04, respectively), “Being in a group performance,” “Telling a lie,” and “Babysitting” all featured average vividness ratings below the midpoint of the scale (Ms = 3.61, 3.82, and 3.83, respectively). This variability in phenomenology echoes past findings regarding the importance of the cue in shaping one’s experience of mental time travel (Maki et al., 2013; Rasmussen & Berntsen, 2014; Rice & Rubin, 2011). Descriptive statistics for each cue used in Study 1 are reported in the Supplemental Material.