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.