Role Of Prior Information In Reconstructing Real-life Event Sequences

Retrieving the temporal order of events could be supported by multiple strategies.For judging the temporal order of real-life events,often we do not need to retrieve specific memory,instead we are able to logically infer the order,e.g.,a thesis pre-defense always happens earlier than a formal thesis defense.This study probes the role of prior information in judging the temporal order of real-life events.In two experiments,we dissociated the narrated order and the chronological order of narrative events using non-linear video narratives.Participants first watched a non-linear narrated video narrative,and then they were tested on two order-judgment tasks: judging either the chronological order or the narrated order of a pair of frames extracted from the film,and underwent fMRI in Experient 2.For judging the chronological order,participants can only rely on prior knowledge.We found that participants' judgments of the chronological order of events were biased by the narrated order,and judgments of the narrated order were also biased by the chronological order.Interpreting the bias under a descriptive Bayesian framework,we offer a new perspective on the role of the prior belief that participants would assume the two orders are congruent(iconicity assumption),apart from prior knowledge about event sequences,in event understanding and memory.FMRI results showed that the posteromedial regions were preferentially engaged by schema-based chronological order judgments,revealing their roles in representing abstract knowledge about sequences.These results highlight the role of prior information in reconstructing real-life event sequences.