How what we tell becomes what we know: Listener effects on speakers’ long‐term memory for events

Abstract

Telling others about past events can be viewed as rehearsing one's memory for a set of events, and a recollection on one occasion might exert long‐term influences on event memory. Because variations in the social context of recollection affect how we tell others about events, such variations can also come to influence long‐term memory. In our study, we varied aspects of the listener's behavior during an event recollection by having participants view brief movie excerpts, and then we had them either recount those excerpts to attentive listeners, recount them to distracted listeners, or not recount them at all. We then compared participants’ long‐term memory for the movie excerpts. Our results show that attentive listeners facilitate long‐term memory, whereas situations with distracted listeners are difficult to distinguish from the situations with no listener and with no recounting at all. The paradigm and these exploratory results represent one potential avenue for investigating social aspects of memory.