Keywords :
Autobiographical memory; Episodic future thinking; Retrieval processes; Uncertainty; Humans; Male; Female; Young Adult; Adult; Thinking/physiology; Memory, Episodic; Imagination/physiology; Imagination; Thinking; Experimental and Cognitive Psychology; Developmental and Educational Psychology; Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
Abstract :
[en] We live in uncertain times and how this pervasive sense of uncertainty affects our ability to think about the future remains largely unexplored. This study aims to investigate the effects of uncertainty salience on episodic future thinking-the ability to mentally represent specific future events. Experiment 1 assessed the impact of uncertainty on the accessibility of episodic future thoughts using an event fluency task. Participants were randomly assigned to either an uncertainty induction or control condition, and then were asked to imagine as many future events as possible that could happen in different time periods. The results showed that participants in the uncertainty condition produced fewer events, suggesting that uncertainty salience reduced the accessibility of episodic future thoughts. Experiment 2 investigated in further detail the mechanisms of production of episodic future thoughts that are affected by uncertainty. The results showed that uncertainty primarily reduced the accessibility of previously formed future thoughts (i.e., memories of the future) rather than affecting the ability to generatively think about the future and construct events. These findings shed new light on the impact of uncertainty on episodic future thinking, paving the way to further investigation into its implications for decision-making and future-oriented behavior.
Funding text :
This work was supported by the University of Liège (Crédit Facultaire 2021). Arnaud D’Argembeau is a Research Director of the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.R.S.-FNRS), Belgium. We thank Océane Marchica for her help in data collection in Experiment 2.
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