Daniel L Schacter

Harvard University | Harvard · Department of Psychology

Over time, memories lose episodic detail and become distorted, a process with serious ramifications for eyewitness identification. What are the processes contributing to such transformations over time? We investigated the roles of post learning sleep and retrieval practice in memory accuracy and distortion, using a naturalistic story recollection t...

Objective: Suicidal individuals experience ambivalent states where they simultaneously consider death and the continuation of their lives. But we have little understanding of how suicidal individuals, particularly youth, mentally construct their future lives. To address this knowledge gap, we aimed to examine episodic future thinking and the relat...

LeDoux’s work on the emotional brain has had broad impact in neuroscience and psychology. Here, we discuss an aspect of the emotional brain that we have examined in our laboratory during the past two decades: emotional future simulations or constructed mental representations of positive and negative future experiences. Specifically, we consider res...

Mental time travel is often presented as a singular mechanism, but theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that it is composed of component processes. What are these components? Three hypotheses about the major components of mental time travel are commonly considered: (i) remembering and imagining might, respectively, rely on different pro...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Memory covers the science of human memory, its application to clinical disorders, and its broader implications for learning and memory in real-world contexts. Written by field leaders, the handbook integrates behavioral, neural, and computational evidence with current theories of how humans learn and remember. Following...

Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) is a rare form of enhanced memory in which individuals demonstrate an extraordinary ability to remember details of their personal lives with high levels of accuracy and vividness. Neuroimaging studies have identified brain regions - specifically, midline areas within the default network - associated wi...

Objectives How does creative expression change across the lifespan? While creativity is generally preserved well into adulthood, certain cognitive functions, such as episodic detail and ideational fluency, have been shown to decline with age. The present study employs computational linguistic analyses to investigate the salient features of creative...

Episodic memory relies on constructive processes that support simulating novel future events by flexibly recombining elements of past experiences, and that can also give rise to memory errors. In recent studies, we have developed methods to characterize the cognitive and neural processes that support conscious experiences linked to this process of...

Background Despite increased attention on treatment and prevention for suicidal adolescents, we know little about potential intervention targets. Episodic future thinking—the ability to imagine detailed, personal, and future‐oriented events—is a modifiable cognitive process that has been linked with suicidal ideation (SI) in adolescents. However, u...

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, particularly in the context of generative art, a critical question emerges about the future role of human creativity: In the age of generative AI, does individual creative ability still matter? Here, we explored this question via an online, pre-registered study involving 375 participants who comp...

The autobiographical interview has been used in more than 200 studies to assess the content of autobiographical memories. In a typical experiment, participants recall memories, which are then scored manually for internal details (episodic details from the central event) and external details (largely non-episodic details). Scoring these narratives r...

Recent developments in computerized scoring via semantic distance have provided automated assessments of verbal creativity. Here, we extend past work, applying computational linguistic approaches to characterize salient features of creative text. We hypothesize that, in addition to semantic diversity, the degree to which a story includes perceptual...

Objective Studies suggest that internally oriented cognitive processes are central to creativity. Here, we distinguish between intentional and unintentional forms of mind wandering and explore their component contributions to creativity. Furthermore, we describe resting-state connectivity profiles associated with these trait-level measures of mind...

Little empirical work has examined future thinking in narcissistic grandiosity. We here extend prior work finding that people scoring high in grandiosity have self-bolstering tendencies in remembering past events, and we consider whether these tendencies extend to imagining future events. Across an initial study (N= 112) and replication (N= 169), p...

We propose that episodic thought (i.e., episodic memory and imagination) is a domain where the language-of-thought hypothesis (LoTH) could be fruitfully applied. On the one hand, LoTH could explain the structure of what is encoded into and retrieved from long-term memory. On the other, LoTH can help make sense of how episodic contents come to play...

Martin Conway's influential theorising about the self-memory system (Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107(2), 261-288) illuminated how the "working self" influences the construction of autobiographical memories. Moreover, his constructive v...

We propose that episodic thought (i.e., episodic memory and imagination) is a domain where LoTH could be fruitfully applied. On one hand, LoTH could elucidate the structure of what is encoded into and retrieved from long-term memory. On the other hand, LoTH can help make sense of how episodic contents come to play such a large variety of different...

Youth experiencing suicidal thoughts and/or behaviors (STBs) frequently present to emergency departments for acute psychiatric care. These settings offer a transitory yet pivotal opportunity to assess, intervene on, and plan continued care for STBs. This study examined a clinically relevant, understudied aspect of psychological functioning among yo...

Despite its theoretical importance, little is known about how semantic memory structure facilitates and constrains creative idea generation. We examine whether the semantic richness of a concept has both benefits and costs to creative idea generation. Specifically, we tested whether cue set size-an index of semantic richness reflecting the average...

The neuroscience of creativity seeks to disentangle the complex brain processes that underpin the generation of novel ideas. Neuroimaging studies of functional connectivity, particularly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have revealed individual differences in brain network organization associated with creative ability; however, much of...

Creativity reflects the remarkable human capacity to produce novel and effective ideas. Empirical work suggests that creative ideas do not just emerge out of nowhere but typically result from goal-directed memory processes. Specifically, creative ideation is supported by controlled retrieval, involves semantic and episodic memory, builds on process...

The recollection of episodic-autobiographical memories (EAMs) entails a complex temporal dynamic, from initial "construction" to subsequent "elaboration" of memories. While there is consensus that EAM retrieval involves a distributed network of brain regions, it is still largely debated which regions specifically contribute to EAM construction and/...

Episodic representations can be entertained either as “remembered” or “imagined”—as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a dedicated cognitive function: the metacognitive capacity to determine the mnemicity of mental event simulations. We argue that mnemicity attribution sho...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) delivered to the angular gyrus (AG) affects hippocampal function and associated behaviors (Thakral PP, Madore KP, Kalinowski SE, Schacter DL. Modulation of hippocampal brain networks produces changes in episodic simulation and divergent thinking. 2020a. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 117:12729-12740). Here, we exa...

Constructive episodic retrieval processes play an adaptive role in supporting divergent thinking (i.e., creatively combining diverse bits of information) and means-end problem solving (i.e., generating steps to solve a social problem). However, the constructive nature of episodic memory that supports these adaptive functions also leads to memory er...

General Audience Summary We rely on our memories to perform countless tasks in our everyday lives. But our memories are not perfect: Much psychological research has revealed that memory does not operate like a videorecorder and is subject to errors that can cause problems in everyday life. These errors range from relatively harmless incidents where...

Episodic representations can be entertained either as ‘remembered’ or as ‘imagined’ – as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a dedicated cognitive function: the metacognitive capacity to determine the ‘mnemicity’ of mental event simulations. We argue that mnemicity attribut...

Intertemporal decision-making has long been assumed to measure self-control, with prominent theories treating choices of smaller, sooner rewards as failed attempts to override immediate temptation. If this view is correct, people should be more confident in their intertemporal decisions when they ‘successfully’ delay gratification than when they do...

General Audience Summary Since late 2019, news outlets and social media platforms have shown examples of people in need amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Across a series of studies, we examine whether people are more willing to help others in need after imagining a scenario in which they help the other person, compared to when they passively read the s...

Studies suggest that internally oriented cognitive processes are central to creativity. Here, we distinguish between intentional and unintentional forms of mind wandering and explore their behavioral and neural correlates. We used a sample of 155 healthy adults from the mind-brain-body dataset, all of whom completed resting-state fMRI scans and tra...

Mounting evidence suggests distinct functional contributions of the anterior and posterior hippocampus to autobiographical memory retrieval, but how these subregions function under different retrieval demands as memories age is not yet understood. Specifically, autobiographical memory retrieval is not a homogeneous process; rather, it is thought to...

Creative ideas are thought to result from flexible recombination of concepts from memory. A growing number of behavioural and neuroscientific studies provide evidence of a link between episodic memory and divergent thinking; however, little is known about the potential contributions of autobiographical memory to creative ideation. To provide a nove...

Mounting evidence suggests distinct functional contributions of the anterior and posterior hippocampus to autobiographical memory retrieval, but how these subregions function under different retrieval demands as memories age is not yet understood. Specifically, autobiographical memory retrieval is not a homogenous process, rather, it is thought to...

Shifting to a novel visual perspective during retrieval influences autobiographical memories (AM) and can lead to persistent changes in memories. Adopting an observer-like compared to an own eyes perspective reduces episodic information during AM recall, but less is known regarding how viewpoint influences semantic information. In the current study...

Recent work indicates that eye movements support the retrieval of episodic memories by reactivating the spatiotemporal context in which they were encoded. Although similar mechanisms have been thought to support simulation of future episodes, there is currently no evidence favoring this proposal. In the present study, we investigated the role of ey...

A variety of evidence demonstrates that memory is a reconstructive process prone to errors and distortions. However, the complex relationship between memory encoding, strength of memory reactivation, and the likelihood of reporting true or false memories has yet to be ascertained. We address this issue in a setting that mimics a real-life experienc...

Human beings regularly "mentally travel" to past and future times in memory and imagination. In theory, whether an event is remembered or imagined (its "mnemicity") underspecifies whether it is oriented toward the past or the future (its "temporality"). However, it remains unclear to what extent the temporal orientation of such episodic simulations...

The Autobiographical Interview has been used in more than two hundred studies to assess the content of autobiographical memories. In a typical experiment, participants recall memories, which are then scored manually for internal details (episodic details from the central event) and external details (largely non-episodic details). Scoring these narr...

Bckground Theories of suicide suggest that suicidal ideation (SI) results in part from difficulty imagining the future, which itself relies on the ability to remember the past. The present study examines multiple components of episodic future thinking and memory including event richness, which is commonly measured within the cognitive literature bu...

Human memory is prone to error and distortion. It has been proposed that memory's misdeeds can be classified into seven categories or ‘sins’. This article discusses the impact of media and technology on four memory sins: transience (forgetting over time), absent-mindedness (lapses in attention that produce forgetting), misattribution (attributing a...

A prominent feature of mental event (i.e. ‘episodic’) simulations is their temporal orientation: human adults can generate episodic representations directed towards the past or the future. Here, we investigated how the temporal orientation of imagined events relates to the contents of these events. Is there something intrinsically temporal about ep...

Episodic retrieval plays a functional-adaptive role in supporting divergent thinking, the ability to creatively combine different pieces of information. However, the same constructive memory process that provides a functional-adaptive benefit can also leave memory prone to error. In two experiments, we employed an individual differences approach to...

A prominent feature of mental event (i.e. ‘episodic’) simulations is their temporality: human adults can generate episodic representations directed towards the past or the future. The ability to entertain event representations with different temporal orientations allows these representations to play various cognitive roles. Here, we investigated ho...

Previous research indicates that episodic retrieval contributes to divergent creative thinking. However, this research has relied on standard laboratory tests of divergent creative thinking, such as generating creative uses for objects; it is unknown whether episodic retrieval also contributes to domain-specific forms of creativity. Here we start t...

Older adults are at high risk of suffering debilitating health effects from COVID-19. Effective communication of associated risks is therefore paramount. A new study finds that imagining a personalized disease transmission event amplifies perceived risk and bolsters risk-related information seeking in older age.

Over time, memories lose episodic detail and become distorted, a process with serious ramifications for topics such as eyewitness identification. What are the processes which contribute to such transformation over time? We investigated the roles of post learning sleep and retrieval practice in memory accuracy, transformation, and distortion, using...

Divergent thinking (the ability to generate creative ideas by combining diverse types of information) has been previously linked to the ability to imagine novel and specific future autobiographical events. Here, we examined whether divergent thinking is differentially associated with the ability to construct novel imagined future events and recast...

Recent work indicates that eye movements support the retrieval of episodic memories by reactivating the spatiotemporal context in which they were encoded. Although similar mechanisms have been thought to support simulation of future episodes, there is currently no evidence to support this proposal. In the present study, we investigated the role of...

In an analysis of memory systems, Sherry and Schacter (Psychological Review, 94, 439–454, 1987) emphasized the importance of functional and evolutionary considerations for characterizing mechanisms of memory. The present article considers four different yet closely related topics from more recent research in which similar considerations have played...

We often prepare for the future by imagining or simulating events that might happen. A growing body of evidence indicates that people simulate these future experiences by retrieving and recombining elements of their episodic memories. In this chapter, we will review the role of the extensively studied default network in this process of episodic sim...

Affective future thinking allows us to prepare for future outcomes, but we know little about neural representation of emotional future simulations. We used a multi-voxel pattern analysis to determine whether patterns of neural activity can reliably distinguish between positive and negative future simulations. Neural patterning in the anterior cingu...

Ainslie offers an encompassing and compelling account of willpower, although his big-picture view comes occasionally at the cost of low resolution. We comment on ambiguity in the metacognitive and prospective mechanisms of resolve implicated in recursive self-prediction. We hope to show both the necessity and promise of specifying testable cognitiv...

Flexible retrieval mechanisms that allow us to infer relationships across events may also lead to memory errors or distortion when details of one event are misattributed to the related event. Here, we tested how making successful inferences alters representation of overlapping events, leading to false memories. Participants encoded overlapping asso...

Significance The hippocampus is central to healthy memory function, yet its necessity for remembering events from the distant past remains unclear. Prominent hypotheses alternatively suggest a time-limited or an indefinite role. fMRI evidence, typically based on silent in-scanner recall, has been equivocal, possibly because it provides sparse infor...

We review the latest evidence from animal models, studies in humans using electrophysiology, experimental memory paradigms, and non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS), in the form of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), suggesting that the altered activity in networks that contribute to the autobiographical memory (ABM) deficits may...

Memory serves critical functions in everyday life, but it is also vulnerable to error and illusion. Two decades ago, I proposed that memory errors could be classified into seven basic categories or “sins”: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. I argued that each of the seven sins provides im...

The necessity of the human hippocampus for remote autobiographical recall remains fiercely debated. The standard model of consolidation predicts a time-limited role for the hippocampus, but the competing multiple trace/trace transformation theories posit indefinite involvement. Lesion evidence remains inconclusive, and the inferences one can draw f...

Humans can vividly recall and re-experience events from their past, and these are commonly referred to as episodic or autobiographical memories. fMRI experiments reliably associate autobiographical event recall with activity in a network of "default"or "core"brain regions. However, as prior studies have relied on covert (silent) recall procedures,...

Episodic simulation is the construction of a mental representation of a specific autobiographical future event. Episodic simulation has increasingly been studied in psychiatric populations. Here we 1) review evidence indicating that episodic simulation is compromised in patients with depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and PTSD; a...

Memory is a constructive, not reproductive, process that is prone to errors. Errors in memory, though, may originate from normally adaptive memory processes. At the extreme of memory distortion is falsely “remembering” an event that did not occur. False memories are well-studied in cognitive psychology, but have received relatively less attention i...

Age-related changes in visual exploration and memory have typically been studied separately. However, recent evidence suggests that mnemonic processes both affect, and are affected by, eye movements (EMs). Thus, by relating older adults’ memory deficits to age-specific visual exploration patterns, we can improve upon models of cognitive aging.

The human imagination manifests in countless different forms. We imagine the possible and the impossible. How do we do this so effortlessly? Why did the capacity for imagination evolve and manifest with undeniably manifold complexity uniquely in human beings? This handbook reflects on such questions by collecting perspectives on imagination from lea...

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus‐2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) that has caused the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic represents the greatest international biopsychosocial emergency the world has faced for a century, and psychological science has an integral role to offer in helping societies recover. The aim of this paper is to set out...

Despite advances in understanding the consequences of age-related episodic memory decline for future simulation, much remains unknown regarding changes in the neural underpinnings of future thinking with age. We used a repetition suppression paradigm to explore age-related changes in the neural correlates of emotional future simulation. Younger and...

Significance Studies have suggested a role for episodic memory in imagining future events and thinking creatively. Here, we tested the causal role played by episodic memory in future imagining and creative thinking by using fMRI-guided transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt neural activity in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in episod...

Misinformation causes serious harm, from sowing doubt in modern medicine to inciting violence. Older adults are especially susceptible—they shared the most fake news during the 2016 U.S. election. The most intuitive explanation for this pattern lays the blame on cognitive deficits. Although older adults forget where they learned information, fluenc...

Cognitive and neuroimaging evidence suggests that episodic and semantic memory—memory for autobiographical events and conceptual meaning, respectively—support different facets of creative thinking, with a growing number of studies reporting activation of brain regions within the default network during performance on creative thinking tasks. The pre...

Many fundamental choices in life are intertemporal: they involve trade-offs between sooner and later outcomes. In recent years there has been a surge of interest into how people make intertemporal decisions, given that such decisions are ubiquitous in everyday life and central in domains from substance use to climate change action. While it is clea...

Objectives: A common finding in the mind-wandering literature is that older adults (OAs) tend to mind-wander less frequently than young adults (YAs). Here, we sought to determine whether this age-related difference in mind-wandering is attributable to age-related differences in motivation. Method: YAs and OAs completed an attention task during w...

According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, episodic simulation (i.e., imagining specific novel future episodes) draws on some of the same neurocognitive processes that support episodic memory (i.e., recalling specific past episodes). Episodic retrieval supports the ability to simulate future experiences by providing access to epi...

Episodic simulation - the mental construction of a possible future event - has been consistently associated with enhanced activity in a set of neural regions referred to as the core network. In the current functional neuroimaging study, we assessed whether members of the core network are differentially associated with the subjective experience of f...

We explored the possibility that increasing participants’ motivation to perform well on a focal task can reduce mind wandering. Participants completed a sustained-attention task either with standard instructions (normal motivation), or with instructions informing them that they could be excused from the experiment early if they achieved a certain l...

Remembering the past and imagining the future are hallmarks of mental time travel. We provide evidence that such experiences are influenced by individual differences in temporal and affective biases in cognitive style, particularly brooding rumination (a negative past-oriented bias) and optimism (a positive future-oriented bias). Participants compl...

Humans have the adaptive capacity for imagining hypothetical episodes. Such episodic simulation is based on a neural network that includes the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). This network draws on existing knowledge (e.g., of familiar people and places) to construct imaginary events (e.g., meeting with the person at that place). Here, we te...

The concepts of agency of one's actions and ownership of one's experience have proved useful in relating body representations to bodily consciousness. Here we apply these concepts to cognitive maps. Agency is defined as ‘the sense that I am the one who is generating the experience represented on a cognitive map’, while ownership is defined as ‘the...

Objective: When younger adults simulated positive future events, subsequent memory is positively biased. In the current studies we explore age-related changes in the impact of emotional future simulation on subsequent memory. Methods: In Experiment 1, younger and older adults simulated emotional future events before learning the hypothetical outco...

Previous research suggests that default-mode network (DMN) and dorsal attention network (DAN) are involved in internally- and externally-directed attention, respectively, through interactions with salience network (SN) and frontoparietal network (FPCN). Performing a task requiring external attention is often accompanied by a down-regulation of atte...

Creative thinking has long been associated with spreading of activation through concepts within semantic memory. Despite its theoretical importance, little is yet known about how semantic memory structure facilitates and constrains idea production. We examine one potential influence on spreading activation during divergent thinking known as the fan...

Recalling and imagining autobiographical experiences involves constructing event representations within spatiotemporal contexts. We tested whether generating autobiographical events within a primarily spatial (where the event occurred) or temporal (the sequence of actions that occurred) context affected how the associated mental representation was...

Numerous studies indicate that an episodic specificity induction (ESI)-brief training in recollecting the details of a past experience-enhances performance on subsequent tasks that rely on episodic retrieval, including autobiographical memory, imagination, problem solving, and creative thinking. In 5 experiments, we examined whether these benefits...

Interventions that increase the specificity of episodic memory and future-oriented problem solving have been shown to help both young adults and clinical populations regulate their emotions toward potential stressors. However, little is known about how episodic specificity impacts anxiety levels in older adults, who show reduced specificity of epis...

In this article I discuss some of the major questions, findings, and ideas that have driven my research program, which has examined various aspects of human memory using a combination of cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging approaches. I do so from a career perspective that describes important scientific influences that have shaped my ap...

Recent claims that people spend 30–50% of their waking lives mind wandering (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Kane et al., 2007) have become widely accepted and frequently cited. While acknowledging attention to be inconstant and wavering, and mind wandering to be ubiquitous, we argue and present evidence that such simple quantitative estimates are m...