Shared and item-specific information in memory for event descriptions

Abstract

If you are asked to remember an event described by a sentence, how will your memory be affected by the number of related events experienced in the same context? The experiments reported here address this empirical question within the theoretical framework of relational and item-specific information. Assuming that both common and distinctive features of events are important in recall, encoding of both types of information should produce optimal performance. Assuming further that the type of information encoded, either common or distinctive, is influenced by manipulations, such as the number of related sentences and the orienting task, recall should be a product of the interaction between set size and type of orienting task. The results of these experiments were consistent with this prediction. Subsidiary analyses supported the interpretation of this interaction in terms of the differential availability of relational and item-specific information. The results are discussed in the context of the script pointer + tag hypothesis of schema theory. © 1986 Psychonomic Society, Inc.