Hypothesis
As the time frame of a self-report question lengthens, people abandon episodic recall for semantic, belief-based answers, which should show up as a flattening of response times and ratings at longer time frames.
What failed
469 adults rated eight emotions and symptoms over 12 time frames from right now to in general. Response times and ratings rose with longer time frames, but there was no consistent flattening or drop in slope that would mark a switch in retrieval strategy, for either emotions or symptoms.
Broken assumption
There is a detectable point at which longer self-report time frames switch people from episodic to semantic retrieval.
Why
The authors suggest people may keep trying to retrieve episodic information even for long time frames.
From the published paper: Walentynowicz et al. PLoS ONE, 2018. ↗CC BY