Fig. 1.

Schematic of the experimental structure over three consecutive weeks. Week 1: Participants experienced autobiographical events in their own lives. In addition they watched the feature-length movie “Sideways”, and watched a selection of short clips featuring minor news events. Week 2: One week later participants returned and their memory for recent autobiographical events as well as events from the movie and news clips was tested. Participants then created imagined autobiographical scenarios, imagined events involving the characters of the film and imagined news events. They also viewed a selection of acontextual objects on a computer screen and created images of acontextual objects in their imagination. Week 3: A memory recall task was performed during fMRI. Trials began with a text cue informing participants which real or previously imagined event/object to recall (further examples of cues are given in Table 2), followed by 20 s during which they re-experienced that event/object with their eyes closed. After an audio tone sounded, participants opened their eyes and performed a series of ratings (see Methods).