The role of episodic detail in altruistic intentions
abc
C.M. ,
ab
M.P. ,
ac
M.
Sawczak,
McAndrews,
& Moscovitch,
aDepartment of Psychology, University of Toronto; bToronto Western Research Institute;
cRotman Research Institute at Baycrest
Background
• Recent work has shown that imagining oneself
helping a person in need increases one’s reported
willingness to help that person compared to
thinking conceptually of ways to help1.
• Participants’ ratings of willingness to help correlate
with their own ratings of detail in their imagined
events, but it is not clear whether detail plays a
causal role here, nor whether imagining another
person helping would produce the same effect.
• Detail and self-referential processing may be
acting together to create a more durable memory
of the imagined event, one that is more easily
retrieved and thus more likely to influence one’s
decision about whether or not to help someone.
• Individuals who have had the hippocampus on one
side of the brain removed as part of surgery for
epilepsy (anterior temporal lobectomy; ATL) have
very sparsely detailed memories2, and research in
other patient populations3 suggests that they will
also be unable to imagine future events in detail.
Hypotheses
• If detail plays a causal role in effect of imagination
on willingness to help, then patients who have
undergone ATL surgery should show a diminished
effect compared to healthy control participants.
• If self-referential processing is an important factor
in this effect, then imagining another person
helping should lead to a smaller effect.
Before testing ATL patients, we are collecting pilot
data on healthy young adults to ensure that we are
taking the most suitable approach.
References
1. Gaesser, B. & Schacter, D.L. (2014). Episodic simulation and episodic
memory can increase intentions to help others. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 111, 4415–4420.
2. St-Laurent, M., Moscovitch, M., Jadd, R., & McAndrews, M.P. (2014). The
perceptual richness of complex memory episodes is compromised by
medial temporal lobe damage. Hippocampus, 24, 560–576.
Pilot Experiment
Fig. 2: Detail predicts willingness to help
Method Forty-three healthy young adults were shown
30 short stories of persons in situations of need and,
on a within-participant basis, they pseudo-randomly
either imagined themselves helping the person in the
story; imagined another person helping; or solved
math problems (as a baseline condition). Next, they
made ratings for each story, including how willing they
were to help the person in each one. Finally,
participants completed the Toronto Empathy
Questionnaire (TEQ)4 as a measure of trait empathy.
Results Imagining oneself helping led to significantly
greater willingness to help compared to the baseline
condition (see Fig. 1), replicating Gaesser & Schacter’s
1
(2014) original study. There was a trend towards
imagining oneself leading to greater willingness to
help compared to imagining another person helping.
A hierarchical regression model, with each imagined
event as its own data point (N=1,229), showed that
subjective ratings of the detail significantly predicted
willingness to help on a trial-by-trial basis (see Fig. 2)
even when controlling for trait empathy (TEQ score).
Fig. 1: Mean willingness to help, by task
Next Steps
• We are currently piloting a similar paradigm using an
adapted version of the Autobiographical Interview (AI)5
protocol for assessing the amount of episodic (eventspecific) and semantic (general-knowledge-based)
detail content in imagined events.
• We are planning on using AI methods with ATL
patients because previous experience has made it
clear that these individuals do not reliably rate the level
of detail in their own episodic memories the way
healthy control participants do.
• Using AI methods will also shed light on whether or not
the effect of imagination on willingness to help is more
closely related to how detailed participants perceive
their imagined events to be compared to more
objective measures of detail.
References (continued)
3. Hassabis, D., Kumaran, D., Vann, S.D., & Maguire, E.A. (2007). Patients with
hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 104, 1726–1731.
4. Spreng, R.N., McKinnon, M.C., Mar, R.A., & Levine, B. (2009). The Toronto
Empathy Questionnaire: Scale development and initial validation of a factoranalytic solution to multiple empathy measures. Journal of Personality
Assessment, 91, 62–71.
5. Levine, B., Svoboda, E., Hay, J.F., Winocur, G., & Moscovitch, M. (2002). Aging
and autobiographical memory: Dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval.
Psychology and Aging, 17, 677–689.