The Effects of Future Daydreaming on Memory 

Effects of daydreaming (essay)

Daydreaming is your mind wandering - having thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand. Daydreaming allows us to transport ourselves to different and distant times and places. This mental voyage creates a context change - going from the original time and place to that of the imagined. Shifting your attention away from your original context makes it hard to remember much information. Researchers have found that changing your spatial context, such as walking into a different room, can cause retrieval failure and forgetting objects from the prior location. This change of context is important when explaining what happens when you go on a mini-mental vacation. Even though you may be physically in one space, daydreaming changes your mental context by mentally transporting you into another space and time. Research suggests that you will most likely not remember what happened in the moments prior to your daydreaming episode.

Research has expanded upon the effects of daydreaming about past events on memory. Storm and Jobe examined the differences and similarities between remembering situations in the past and imagining them in the future with regard to daydreaming. The main claim of this study is that imagining the future and remembering the past both use corresponding sets of cognitive processes, and therefore imagining specific situations in the future should have many similarities to and should cause similar types of forgetting as focusing on the past. Because both types of daydreaming involve a certain amount of context change, this would cause them to affect memory in similar ways. The researchers compared these two different types of daydreaming by having participants study a list of events, imagine certain events in the future, and picture certain events in the past. The participants were tested on their memory of each event by filling out a cued-recall test. The results of this study reveal that there are many overlapping mechanisms involved in remembering the past and imagining the future.

The most important factor of these studies on daydreaming and its effect on memory retrieval is the assumption that daydreaming creates a mental context change that prevents the consolidation of the newly encoded information. Sahakyan and Kelley concluded from their study that context changes (i.e. imagine being invisible) have a similar effect on memory as instructions of directed forgetting. This context-change theory has been reinforced by later studies, such as that of Radvansky and Copeland, where subjects showed forgetting after walking into different rooms. However, walking into different rooms causes a physical context change. Daydreaming would have to induce a mental context change, in which the person is transported from one mental location to another, in order to cause a retrieval failure in a similar fashion.

Connecting the topics of context change, daydreams, and retrieval failures, perhaps the most relevant research regarding the present study was an experiment done by Delaney, Sahakyan, Kelley and Zimmerman. In this study, the researchers explored the amnesic effects of daydreaming and how the thoughts generated during typical daydreams can often cause forgetting of events that have been previously encoded. This forgetting occurs due to the mental context change. This changing of one’s thoughts creates a new mental context in which the information is encoded. Based on this context-change account, the main hypothesis of the authors was that daydreams that are more similar in both distance and time to the current moment that a person is experiencing will result in less forgetting than daydreams that are more different from the current moment.

In order to test this hypothesis, the authors used the diversion paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are required to study a list of words, participate in diversionary thought processes, and then to study the second list of words. In their experiment, 138 participants were required to study a list of sixteen English nouns presented on a screen. After having studied this list of words, participants were required to perform one of three actions. The control condition was simply directed to read aloud a passage from an introductory psychology textbook. The participants in the near-change condition were asked to think carefully about their current house, imagine themselves there and draw a picture of the house. The participants in the far-change condition were instructed to think about their parents’ house, imagine themselves there, and then draw a picture of it. After having completed these tasks in the various conditions, all participants studied the second list of words, also consisting of sixteen English nouns. Finally, they were given a free recall test for each list of words. The results of this study show that the participants in the far-change condition showed increased levels of forgetting compared to participants in both the near-change condition and the control condition.

The results of this study indicate that a greater shift in mental context causes more forgetting to occur. These results support the context-change account of forgetting because traveling to a more distant mental context caused people to forget more information than traveling to a closer mental context, or not travel at all. Travelling to further mental contexts caused the participants to have a harder time recalling information from the list of words they had studied once they were back in their original mental contexts. Because they had encoded the information in a context that was further away from their current situation, this made it more difficult for them to recall this information once they were no longer daydreaming and they had returned back to their actual contexts.

Although a great deal of research has been devoted to exploring how an external contextual shift affects memory, relatively few studies have focused on how changing the mental context affects memory. The present study aims to examine how manipulation of mental context affects later recall. Specifically, we wanted to look at how imagining the future could affect present memory. Following the same outline as the Delaney et al. study, we looked into how daydreaming about your life in the future would affect your memory of a list of words. Using the findings from Storm and Jobe, we hypothesized that the future should act the same as the past memories of the Delaney et al. study. Therefore, we believed that when instructed to daydream about the future, participants would have more forgetting when they imagined a more distant future than a closer future.

Method

Participants were 22 Knox College students (15 women and 7 men) which received credit for their introductory psychology course. Those who plan to study abroad were placed in the control group to prevent skewing of results.

Materials

The materials included two lists of English words generated by the MRC Psycholinguistic Database. Both lists consisted of 15 random words with a Kucera-Francis written frequency of a minimum of 50.

Procedure

Participants gathered in a large lecture hall and were instructed to study the shown list of words on a projector screen in front of them. The words were presented in a PowerPoint presentation. Each of the 15 words appeared on a large screen for 5 seconds with 500 milliseconds of blank-screen intervals. The two lists of words were counterbalanced. After presenting the first list of words, participants were divided into three groups: near-change, far-change, and control. Each of the three groups was assigned a different diversion task via a slip of paper. The near-change group was directed to imagine and daydream about their lives in one to two years and write about it in detail on the blank piece of paper provided; the far-change group was directed to do so for their lives in ten years; the control group was given a short excerpt from a textbook for an introductory course to psychology. Then, participants were shown the second list of words in an identical fashion. After the second list of words, participants were given multiplication problems as a filler task. Finally, all participants performed a free-recall task on the two lists of words respectively.

Results

The aim of the study was to determine whether or not there is an effect of the distance in a time of the change in contextual shift, daydreaming, on memory recall. Memory recall was measured by the amount of words correctly recalled from List 1. A one-way between measures ANOVA revealed no significant difference among a mean number of words recalled across all three-time context-shift conditions, F(2, 19) = 0.56, p = 0.580. An independent samples t-test assuming equal variance was conducted to compare number of words recalled between male and female participants. There was no significant difference in number of recalled words between male (M = 5.14, SD = 3.29) participants and female (M = 6.27, SD = 3.17) participants; t(20) = 0.77, p = 0.453.

Discussion

Our data did not support our hypothesis that the further the distance in a time of the contextual-shift daydream from the current context, the worse memory recall would be. Past research has found that daydreams that shift further in time or space (rather than closer) to the current context cause more forgetting. Participants in the far-change groups performed significantly worse than those in the near-change and control conditions on a list-item memory task. Changing the direction in time, we looked at how distance in time, either in the near future (near-change) or farther into the future (far-change), would create a similar contextual shift as to when remembering events in the near and far pasts. Therefore, we hypothesized that there would be a trend that the further from the present, the worse memory recall would be. However, there was no effect of distance in time for future daydreaming on memory recall present in this study.

Based on the findings of Mulji and Bodner, our results might not have supported our hypothesis due to a failure to induce mental context change. Mulji and Bodner conducted a study on the effects of different types of diversion tasks between word lists on retrieval failure. Between lists, participants either had a brief chat with another person, an unexpected task happened (wiping the computer screen and one’s hands) or a number search task. In this experiment, participants displayed the same amount of forgetting as they would from a directed forgetting context change when they were in the unexpected task and chat groups. This study thus expands the definition of mental context change through demonstration. However, their experiment also showed that the other task, the number search, is merely a distraction and cannot induce mental context to change the way imagination, a chat, or an unexpected task can. In our study, we instructed the participants with a slip of paper to write down the expectations of their future. This setup likely did not surpass the threshold of inducing a mental context change and merely served as a distraction. Instead, we should have asked the participants to draw pictures of their future expectations, similar to the method of Delaney et al. The pictures would force the participants into a detailed snapshot of where they see themselves, pushing them to focus on more sensory details than facts or dreams they’ve repeated to themselves so many times that they’ve become reflexive responses.

Manning, Denkova, and Unterberger studied whether the significance of an autobiographical event changed the activation of brain areas. They showed that there was a lack of brain activation for common, public knowledge that had no particular personal significance. More importantly, they showed that there was high brain activation - a specific cerebral pattern network - for autobiographical events which contain personal significance. They concluded that remembering impersonal or imagining future events requires the use of public knowledge. Public knowledge, or semantic-based autobiographical memory, is all knowledge-based, categorical, and superficial facts about a particular event or thought. Episodic memory is a memory that is more specific, with details about a particular event or thought. Our study focused more on semantic memory as we asked people to think about an idea of future events whereas in Delaney et al. they focused on episodic memory as their participants were asked to think about a specific event in time that they had a personal association with, that they had a specific memory they could draw from. Due to this difference between semantic and episodic memory, it would seem that our prompt did not tap into the episodic memories of participants, meaning that we in fact did not induce daydreaming. Therefore, there was no apparent contextual shift in time, which would support why we did not find a trend in worse memory recall as distance in time increased.

Willoughby, Desorcher, Levine, and Rovet studied the episodic versus semantic autobiographical memory of males and females. They showed that females had better overall autobiographical memory of past events than males. More specifically, they showed that females had better episodic memory, and males had better semantic memory. Since our study was geared toward creating semantic memory context in the future, we believe that males would score higher than females. Although women scored higher, the mean difference was only one point. Female participants doubled the amount of male participants, so if there were more male participants then we may have seen a greater separation between gender, and males might have scored better. Several studies have compared gender differences in recall of episodic and semantic memory. They concluded that women recalled more episodic information compared to men; however, there were no gender differences in recall of semantic memory. Also, a review of literature on gender differences of episodic versus semantic memory was conducted by Nilsson, in which they reviewed longitudinal studies that concluded that episodic memory is the only memory network that shows gender differences throughout one’s life and that women consistently outperform men. Since our study had mainly female participants and that it focused on the semantic-based concept of the future, then it may explain why there was no difference between distance in a time of context change. It may be that in order to induce daydreaming, one must think about episodic-based details as seen in the procedure of Delaney et al. where they had participants draw out the house of either their one or of their parents while thinking about themselves in the house and that in fact, semantic-based memory or imagination cannot induce daydreaming at all.

In order to re-test our proposed hypothesis, some changes are in order. Since our prompt was so broad, in a follow-up study we would ask more specific questions about the future in order to activate episodic memory rather than participants just stating broad, semantic facts that they hope to be true in the future. We would ask them to give detailed descriptions of a single aspect of their lives as to further draw them into the daydream state. Instead of just having them free write their ideas, we would do one-on-one interviews with participants so that they would be more specific in their responses.

Having changed the diversion portion of our experiment in the fashion stated above, we believe that our original hypothesis will show true. If we can actually induce a daydreaming state, getting more details so as to involve the episodic memory processes, we believe that daydreaming a more distant future will cause more forgetting than daydreaming a nearer future as we assume that the context for a more distant future will be a greater shift from one’s original context than a closer future’s context. We believe that the specificity we lacked in this study caused our diversionary task to be more of a semantic-based than an episodic-based task, not leading to an actual context shift from the participant’s original context. A daydream may possibly be only produced during episodic memories and not during semantic regurgitations which would mean we did not correctly induce a daydream state. Future studies should make an effort to keep within the episodic-based diversion so as to fully immerse the participants in the contextual shift a daydream provides.