Agency personalizes episodic memories

Humans are agents: our choices actively shape the trajectory of events in our lives. These choices rely on personal knowledge and preferences, but what are the consequences for later memory? We studied 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 were causally or semantically central to the story were better recalled. However, even when all participants read the exact same events, those with full control recalled more idiosyncratic combinations of events. Moreover, their memories were less well predicted by generic sentence embeddings, suggesting a shift away from normative semantic space. Agency also increased 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.