Did I tell you something personal? The influence of the distinctive features on destination memory

Abstract

ABSTRACT Several studies observed that a worse destination memory (i.e., capacity to remember to whom we said something) occurs when personal facts are shared, which was explained based on the internal attentional focus – the attentional focus is on the information and not on the recipient of the information. So, with two experiments, we aimed to mitigate the negative influence of the internal attentional focus on destination memory. Since it was previously observed that sharing information with distinctive faces leads to a better destination memory, in Experiment 1, participants (N = 30) were asked to transmit personal facts to distinctive and undistinctive faces. No differences were observed. To increase the attentional focus on the recipient of the information, in Experiment 2, participants (N = 30) were also asked to evaluate the distinctiveness of the recipients’ faces. A better destination memory was not observed in Experiment 2 compared with Experiment 1. This leads us to conclude that asking participants to evaluate the faces did not promote a better destination memory when personal facts were shared. Nevertheless, by asking to evaluate the faces, the attentional focus was on the faces, where distinctive faces attracted more attention and led to a better destination memory.