Planning an action you never take can make it feel familiar later

Two experiments found that unchosen but plausible moves left memory traces that sometimes made them seem like actions people had already taken.

Editorial illustration — not from the study.

Participants solved a modified Tower of London puzzle, a task in which objects must be moved into a target arrangement. Each puzzle had two equally good solution paths, but participants chose and followed only one of them.

Later, they took a recognition test containing configurations from the chosen path, the unchosen path and new configurations. They were more likely to say they had seen configurations from the unchosen path than new ones, even when the visual similarity of the items was controlled.

Unchosen moves felt familiar

Across two behavioural experiments, participants were more likely to falsely say they had previously seen configurations from an unchosen but plausible solution path than configurations they had not viewed. Further analyses found that participants were less able to distinguish these alternative-path configurations from new ones and were more willing to respond that they were old. The effect remained when new configurations were matched to alternative-path configurations for visual similarity, suggesting that simple perceptual confusion did not explain the result.

Why imagined actions matter

The findings suggest that planning does more than support the action that is eventually carried out. It can also create lasting memory representations of plausible alternatives, making an unchosen action harder to distinguish from one that actually happened. This helps explain how thinking through possible actions can shape later memory, even when those actions are never performed.

Evidence and limits

The evidence comes from two behavioural experiments using a controlled puzzle task and later recognition tests. The abstract does not report the number or characteristics of participants, and the study tested memory for puzzle configurations rather than everyday decisions or actions. The results therefore show that unchosen alternatives can affect recognition in this task, but do not establish how often the same effect occurs in other settings.

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