The grammaticalization of the future does not influence recognition of relevant health information

Recently, researchers have started to experimentally investigate the claim that the grammaticalization of the future may impact our mental representations of future events. Yet, this research has mainly focused on the perceived distance of future events, although with inconclusive results. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of the grammaticalization of the future on recognition memory as cognitive mechanism to affect mental representations of future events. We used gain-framed health messages to further explore potential applications of the hypothesized effect. Concretely, participants were presented with sentences containing information about the effects of certain natural remedies. After this presentation, participants were asked to identify the natural remedies that had been presented to them. Using different temporal conditions, we assessed the number of correct answers. No effect of temporal condition was found, suggesting that the proposed theoretical framework may be inaccurate. We discuss possibilities to further discern our results.