Western Student Research Conference (WSRC) 2025
Poster: The Painted World of the Mind: A Natural Language Processing Investigation of Imagery in Episodic Future Thinking
*This poster was developed and presented by my supervised student, Lara Mohammed Sobhe.
Episodic future thinking refers to the ability to mentally navigate time by envisioning future events, incorporating elements from general event frameworks to sensory and perceptual details. Individual differences in imagery influence the quality of associative processes during event construction. Using language as a proxy, we can explore these cognitive mechanisms. Narratives serve as a proxy to study event construction, as narrations transform fragmented sensory memories into organized, coherent representations. This study focuses on how imagery influences future event construction through verbalized narrations.
We recruited 43 participants through SONA and Prolific. Each participant generated ten narrations based on tailored cues. We used two questionnaires to study spontaneous and voluntary imagery, respectively. Natural Language Processing analyses included VADER for emotional engagement, Lancaster norms for perceptual strength, Brysbert norms for concreteness, and entropy analysis for complexity.
We found that while voluntary imagery did not significantly predict event construction, spontaneous imagery positively correlated with perceptual richness and narrative entropy. Conversely, heightened spontaneous imagery was associated with reduced emotional engagement. This suggests two contrasting spontaneous imagery patterns in event construction: higher focus on perceptual details or higher focus on emotional details. The lack of influence of voluntary imagery confirms that certain structural aspects of event construction, as captured in the narrations, rely on mechanisms independent of the subjective experience of reliving.
Our findings emphasize the relevant role of narration as a proxy to constructing coherent future scenarios, contributing to broader understandings of memory, prospection, and imagery. This distinction has important implications for cognitive science, clinical applications in conditions (e.g., PTSD, aphantasia), and computational approaches to understanding mental simulations.
52 Lake Ontario Visionary Establishment Conference (L.O.V.E.) 2025
Poster: Eternal Sunshine Of The Visual Mind: Vividness and Spontaneous Imagery Differentially Influences Subjective and Objective Aspects of the Simulation of Future Events
Episodic future thinking (EFT), the ability to mentally simulate future events, involves envisioning specific events. EFT integrates general knowledge with unique sensory details. Imagery shapes EFT by influencing the quantity and clarity of included details. We hypothesize that imagery vividness predicts subjective "realness," while spontaneous imagery accounts for the quality of the event's objective information. We analyzed self-reported phenomenological experience and natural language properties (NLP) of 430 future events. Results showed that vividness positively influenced phenomenological experiences across domains but did not significantly impact NLP. Spontaneous imagery significantly enhanced entropy and perceptual strength in narrations while negatively affecting sentiment involvement.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.12284.45442
51 Lake Ontario Visionary Establishment Conference (L.O.V.E.) 2024
Poster: I expect, ergo, I rehearse: Approaching the mechanism of future event thinking using propensity score matching (PSM)
23rd Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology
Poster: Personal Likelihood and Event Familiarity Influence the Simulation of Future Events.
Carleton Cog Sci Graduate Conference 2023
Lightning Talk and Poster title: I expect, ergo, I ruminate. Into the mechanisms of future thinking using propensity score matching (PSM).
Likely future events are experienced as phenomenologically clearer than unexpected events. I attempted to explore the underlying mechanism of this effect. I hypothesized that an event occurring in a person's future causes recurring simulations (or ruminations) of the event in the present. I collected ratings on event familiarity, future event likelihood, event emotional valence, ruminations about the event, and event future frequency (all highly related variables) of 187 events through an online survey of 81 participants. Because the related literature strongly supports the effect of familiarity on the simulation of future events, I first tested whether the relationship between likelihood and ruminations is due to a mediating effect of familiarity. I found a non-significant mediating effect of familiarity on the relationship between likelihood and rumination, suggesting an independent link between these. Subsequently, I used propensity score matching (PSM) to test whether there was a causal relationship between likelihood and rumination. I used PSM because of its potential to offer an alternative causal estimation procedure from data from non-experimental designs. I simulated three competing PSM models to test model accuracy: (1) Likelihood causes rumination, with familiarity, future frequency, and emotional valence as control variables; (2) Rumination causes likelihood to seek reciprocal causation; and (3) Familiarity causes likelihood, with the remaining variables as controls. Model 1 showed a significant treatment effect, but Models 2 and 3 did not. In conclusion, I found evidence that people think more often about events that are likely to be relevant in their future. This could be a feasible mechanism to explain how event likelihood affects the phenomenological experience through repeated previous simulations. Interestingly, people reported being aware of their thinking about the future, including not only its contents but also in terms of frequency.
Psychonomic Society’s 62nd Annual Meeting 2021
Talk: Personal Likelihood and Event Familiarity in the Simulation of future events.
Episodic future thinking is the ability to project the self forward in time to pre-experience an event (Atance & O’Neill, 2001). Understanding how people think about potential future events is an important component of human memory research. We investigated whether and how episodic future thinking is influenced by a person's familiarity with that type of event based on their past experience, as well as a person's belief of the likelihood of its future occurrence in their lives. The individual and combined effects of these variables have been little studied, particularly likelihood. We used three norming studies to develop participant-specific sets of future events that varied by familiarity and likelihood. Participants generated events and rated phenomenological aspects of their simulations. Familiarity and likelihood interacted in influencing people's simulation of future events, specifically on the simulated perceptual information. Both variables influenced episodic future event simulations on their own as well. The enhancement of future event simulations by the likelihood of an event occurring in a person's future suggests that it is an important part of the underlying mechanisms that support episodic future thinking.
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