Predicting Unseen Past is Better Than Future: Real-Lie Scenarios

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A recent study suggests that if one begins watching a film from midway, without any prior knowledge of its storyline, the probability of deducing past events is more than anticipating the future developments. This study was led by Dartmouth and published in Nature Communications ().

Previous studies have shown that humans have ability to predict past as good as they can predict future. However, these investigations have primarily used simple sequences of numbers, images, or shapes, instead of more complex and realistic scenarios.

‘In real-world situations, when the past and future both are unknown, individuals tend to be more adept at inferring the past than predicting the future.’

"Events in real life have complex associations relating to time that haven't typically been captured in past work, so we wanted to explore how people make inferences in situations that are more reminiscent of everyday life," says senior author Jeremy Manning, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and director of the Contextual Dynamics Lab at Dartmouth. "Real life experiences, unlike abstract sequences, often include other people."

For the study, participants watched a series of scenes from two character-driven television dramas, Why Women Kill on CBS and The Chair on Netflix. They were asked to either guess what had happened before each scene, or what would happen next.

Participants were consistently better at guessing what had happened before a just-watched scene than they were at guessing what would happen next.

How the Talks Between People Help Predict Past Better Than Future

The researchers found that participants' inferences were heavily influenced by references to specific past and future events in characters' conversations. Like people in real life, characters in both shows often talked about their past experiences and future plans. Since the characters in those two shows tended to talk more about their pasts, participants had more clues to work from to make inferences about past rather than future events.

To determine if this pattern of talking more about the past extends to other conversations as well, the team analyzed millions of dialogues in novels, movies, television shows, and more. They found that fictional and real people alike tend to talk more about their pasts than their futures. Even though we can make plans for the future, our memories only tell us about our past. Just as real people remember their prior experiences but not those in the future, so too do fictional characters, perhaps, in an effort by writers to help them appear realistic, according to the co-authors.

People Talk More of Past Rather Than Future

"Our results show that on average, people talk one-and-half-times more about the past than the future," says Manning. "And this seems to be a general trend in human conversation."

Prior research has referred to the phenomenon of remembering the past but not the future as the 'psychological arrow of time'. "This phenomenon also reflects that one knows more about their past than their future," explains lead author Xinming Xu, Guarini, a PhD student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and member of the Contextual Dynamics Lab. "Our study shows that a person's asymmetric knowledge of their own life can be transmitted to others."

Reference:

1. Temporal asymmetries in inferring unobserved past and future events - (https:www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52627-5)

Source: Eurekalert