Episodes as chunks in narrative memory

Abstract

Story statements cluster into episodes, so we expected the memory representations of statements to cluster into separate episode chunks in memory. Experiment 1 confirmed this chunking idea by showing that the recall of episode actions depends on the length of that episode, but not on the lengths of other episodes. Specifically, adding more actions to an episode increased recall of the original actions but didn't affect recall of other episodes. Further, subjects rated the original actions as more important than the added actions, thus suggesting that unimportant actions increased the recall of important actions in that episode. Another experiment showed that the more subordinate actions an episode contains, the more likely a statement summarizing that episode is to be recalled.