Interactive narratives reveal the personalizing effect of agency on episodic memory

Abstract

Abstract Humans make choices that actively shape the trajectory of events in their lives. These choices rely on personal knowledge that can influence how these events are later remembered. We study how people’s memory for a naturalistic sequence of events is altered when their choices control the future. Participants read “choose-your-own-adventure” stories with full, partial, or no control over future events. In all conditions, events which are causally or semantically central to the story are better recalled. However, even when all participants read the exact same story, those with full control recall more idiosyncratic combinations of events. Moreover, their memories are less well predicted by generic sentence embeddings, suggesting a shift away from normative semantic space. Agency also increases the likelihood of jointly remembering or forgetting consecutive events. These results reveal that agency fundamentally reshapes memory organization, increasing the influence of idiosyncratic personal factors and strengthening local temporal integration.