How our memory influences the future: a new research result

How our memory influences the future: a new research result

An exciting new study, led by Dartmouth University researchers, has gained interesting insights into our ability to interpret past and future events. The results, published in Nature Communications , show that people are obviously better in drawing conclusions about events that have already happened than making predictions about future developments. This is all the more remarkable when earlier investigations found that guessing the past and future succeeds roughly as well, but often took place in simplified contexts.

The study focused on how people act in more complex, realistic situations. According to Jeremy Manning, a psychology professor at Dartmouth and the senior author of the study, people often offer real experiences of multi -layered contexts that were neglected in previous studies. The researchers let participants watch a series of scenes from two character -driven television series, Why Women Kill and The Chair ,

past reference in television dialogues

The participants were asked to either guess what had happened in front of the scene just respected or what would happen next. The result was clear: the test subjects turned out to be much more capable of explaining the past of the characters instead of predicting the future. This is not surprising, since the dialogues of the characters often refer to their past and offered so many notes to draw logical conclusions.

In addition, the researchers also examined whether this tendency to talk more about the past can be observed in other conversations. They analyzed millions of dialogues from novels, films and TV series and found that both fictional and real people tend to talk more about past and about future events. In fact, the motto of communication seems to be that memories of previous experiences dominate while we can only plan the future vague.

This discovery is known as the 'psychological time arrow' phenomenon, which indicates that our knowledge of the past is more extensive than about the future. Xinming XU, the main author of the study and doctoral student in the field of psychology, emphasizes that the asymmetrical knowledge of a person can also be transferred to others. "On average, people talk about the past one and a half times more than about the future." This confirms the general trend in human conversations.

This research not only opens up new perspectives on our cognitive understanding of time, but also shows how deeply rooted our experiences and memories are in communication. The results could have far -reaching effects on psychology, especially in the way we think about our lives and the associated decisions.

The study was supported by an international team, including Ziyan Zhu from Beijing University and Xueyao Zheng from Beijing Normal University. This cooperation underlines the importance of intercultural perspectives in psychological research.

more detailed information about this study can be viewed in the article at www.miragenews.com become.