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Remembering times ahead:The effect of linguistic framing on representational momentum in state-change events
Yao, Xueyi Jardón, Natalia Kominsky, Jonathan Wittenberg, Eva
Yao, Xueyi
Jardón, Natalia
Kominsky, Jonathan
Wittenberg, Eva
Title / Series / Name
Journal of Memory and Language
Publication Volume
149
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Event memory
Grammatical aspect
Representational momentum
State-change events
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Language and Linguistics
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Linguistics and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Grammatical aspect
Representational momentum
State-change events
Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Language and Linguistics
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Linguistics and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Files
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/28948
Abstract
When people remember scenes, they can draw from different sources to reconstruct their memory, such as what they saw, and linguistic descriptions of what they saw. How human memory for events is impacted by linguistic encoding has been a long-standing question in cognitive science. Here, we ask whether language permeates memory of state-change events. We use the visual phenomenon of Representational Momentum, in which people misremember an event they saw (e.g., a melting ice cube) as more completed than it actually was. After three successful replications of the Representational Momentum effect for state changes (total N = 150), in two further experiments, participants (total N = 400) watched partial videos of state change events that were followed by linguistic descriptions in either imperfective aspect (“the ice was melting”) or perfective aspect (“the ice has melted”). As predicted by linguistic theories, perfective aspect increased the Representational Momentum effect, compared to imperfective aspect. In addition, linguistic encoding improved overall memory accuracy. Our work presents the first evidence that the Representational Momentum effect for state change events is sensitive to linguistic framing, specifically the use of grammatical aspect. More generally, our data contribute to a model of cognition in which different kinds of representations interact in memory.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2026-08
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1016/j.jml.2026.104752