The effects of social memories autobiographical elaboration on incidental memory

Abstract

The present study compared the effects of social memories with those of nonsocial memories on incidental memory. The participants were presented target words on two occasions, and each time they were asked to think of a past episode associated with them the orienting task, followed by an unexpected free-recall test. The results showed that the targets that were associated with social memories, episodes including any person, were recalled more often than those with nonsocial memories. Also, the spacing effect was observed only for the recall of target words associated with social memories. These results were interpreted as showing that the inclusion of any particular person an episode makes an episode itself more distinctive as an effective cue autobiographical elaboration. © 2012 Japanese Psychological Association.