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If you started watching a movie from the middle without knowing its plot, you'd likely be better at inferring what had happened earlier than predicting what will happen next, according to a new Dartmouth-led study published in Nature Communications.

Prior research has found that humans are usually equally good at guessing about the unknown past and future. However, those studies have relied on very simple sequences of numbers, images, or shapes, rather than on more realistic scenarios.

"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."

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

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