Chaz Firestone¹, Tal Boger¹; ¹Johns Hopkins University

The world looks different from one moment to the next, and various mental processes anticipate such changes. A foundational example of this anticipation is representational momentum (RM), wherein the mind ‘plays forward’ visual events. For example, falling objects are recalled as closer to the ground, and rotating rectangles are recalled as more rotated. Though early studies hypothesized that RM primarily concerns the anticipation of motion, recent work demonstrates that it arises for other continuous properties, such as the brightness of a stimulus or even how melted an ice cube appears. Here, we extend representational momentum even further than these sophisticated phenomena, to discrete (rather than continuous) properties, as well as to more conceptual (rather than purely visual) properties of the world. Participants watched animations of common phrases being typed; the animations were interrupted partway through (e.g., “The quick brown fox jum”), and participants used a slider to recall the phrase’s state at the moment it disappeared. 5 experiments revealed ‘phrasal momentum’: The mind plays forward the phrases we see, in ways that distort visual memory. This distortion was greater for real phrases than for (a) strings of “X”s (Experiment 1), (b) length-equated strings of random letters (Experiment 2), and (c) scrambled versions of the words composing the phrases (e.g., “heT kicqu rbnow oxf”; Experiment 3). We also observed a stronger distortion for normal, in-order phrases than for word-shuffled versions of those same phrases (e.g., “The quick brown fox…” vs. “Fox quick the brown…”; Experiment 4). Finally, Experiment 5 found that phrasal momentum follows a conceptual ‘gradient’; in a single experiment combining all the aforementioned conditions, normal phrases produced the strongest RM effects, followed by shuffled phrases, scrambled letters, random letters, and Xs. Thus, representational momentum arises even for discrete and non-visual stimuli.