Imagine this: Memories of fiction are used in mental simulations in the absence of lived experience.

Abstract

Memories of events from fictional sources (e.g., scenes from movies or novels) share many properties with memories of lived experiences (Yang et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151 (5), 1089,  2022). Here we test whether memories of fictional events can serve a similar function to personal memories, serving as the building blocks for simulations of novel scenarios. Across two studies, participants imagined themselves in future scenarios, rated the phenomenological qualities of each simulation (e.g., visual properties), and then identified the sources (e.g., fiction, lived experience) used to generate their simulations. Study 1 (N = 208) focused on people's simulations of a pandemic as a function of whether they had personally experienced the COVID-19 lockdown yet. Participants tested prior to lockdown reported drawing on fictional sources when simulating a pandemic scenario; in contrast, participants tested after lockdown began drew on their own lived experiences when simulating. Study 2 (N = 248) replicated these results using a diverse set of scenarios (e.g., being stuck in an elevator) selected to elicit different levels of prior experience across participants. Again, fictional memories were relied upon when simulating in the absence of lived experience. The results suggest that fictional and personally experienced memories can serve similar functions. Theoretically, the results are consistent with arguments to broaden frameworks of autobiographical memory to include memories of fictional events, in the same way that false memories and vicarious memories are considered to be types of autobiographical memories.