How suspense and surprise enhance subsequent memory: the case of the 2016 United States Presidential Election.

We examined whether the retroactive enhancement effect - i.e., improved memory accuracy for event details occurring before a surprising moment - would be present in participants' memory for details in their private lives following a surprising and suspenseful public event. To equate event type across participants, we selected when they first learned the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential Election. Participants self-divided into those who viewed the outcome as positive, negative, or neutral, while we experimentally divided them into those whose memory was assessed 6 or 12 months post-election. We assessed their accuracy for details surrounding the election and their phenomenological experience of learning the outcome, including emotional tension, our operationalisation of suspense. We found participants' memory characteristics were strongly related to their level of tension and shock, irrespective of valence. We also observed uniformly high accuracy regarding details about the weather participants experienced in their ZIP codes on election day. While these results intimated about the presence of retroactive enhancement, Experiment 2 examined the effect more directly by comparing participants' memory for the 2016 Election with two other politically-relevant events that provoked less tense reactions. The results revealed retroactive enhancement is dependent upon experiencing a surprising moment amidst a suspenseful event.

Through the gateway of the senses: investigating the influence of sensory modality-specific retrieval cues on involuntary episodic memory.

Involuntary memories are memories of past events that come to mind with no preceding attempts of retrieval. They typically arise in response to situational cues, but little is known as to how such cues modulate involuntary memories. Here, we examined how the sensory modality of the cues affects involuntary memory frequency and content. Participants watched first-person perspective films and were later presented with visuospatial and/or auditory cues from the films. We then assessed their experience of involuntary memories for other moments from the films. Across Experiments 1 and 2, visuospatial cues resulted in a greater frequency of involuntary memories, and produced memories with a higher proportion of visual content. In Experiment 3, this effect was replicated using a more auditorily engaging film and occurred whether participants focused on the film's auditory or visual components, but was more pronounced when there was a match between encoding fixation and the retrieval cue. These findings suggest that visuospatial cues may outshine auditory cues in terms of involuntary memory elicitation and content.

The devil is in the details: investigating the influence of emotion on event memory using a simulated event.

In our everyday lives, the negative events we experience sometimes include powerful, salient details which are ultimately responsible for us interpreting the events as negative (i.e., they drive our interpretation of the emotional valence of the event). Here we examined how the presence of such details within an event shapes our memory of that event. Research on the role of emotion in memory suggests that negative events are often remembered more accurately than positive ones, and this advantage is especially pronounced for the emotion-defining details of the events. However, research rarely separates retrieval effects from effects of attention and information processing during encoding. Here we used a simulated event to examine (1) whether negative events are remembered more accurately than positive events, (2) whether this effect is more pronounced for the emotion-defining detail of the event, (3) whether participants display enhanced accuracy for all aspects of an event (i.e., general memory enhancement) or for only certain aspects of the event (i.e., selective memory enhancement), and (4) whether any enhancement effects for central aspects of the event occur at the expense of contextual information (i.e., memory narrowing). Across three experiments, participants showed superior memory accuracy for the central details of the event in general, while those who interpreted the event as emotionally negative also displayed selective enhancement of the peripheral details. The results further suggested that it was the unexpectedness and/or salience introduced by the emotion-defining detail that was essential to enhancing memory accuracy, and not its goal relevance.

Collaboration changes both the content and the structure of memory: Building the architecture of shared representations.

Memory research has primarily focused on how individuals form and maintain memories across time. However, less is known about how groups of people working together can create and maintain shared memories of the past. Recent studies have focused on understanding the processes behind the formation of such shared memories, but none has investigated the structure of shared memory. This study investigated the circumstances under which collaboration would influence the likelihood that participants come to share both a similar content and a similar organization of the past by aligning their individual representations into a shared rendering. We tested how the frequency and the timing of collaboration affect participants' retrieval organization, and how this in turn influences the formation of shared memory and its persistence over time. Across numerous foundational and novel analyses, we observed that as the size of the collaborative inhibition effect-a counterintuitive finding that collaboration reduces group recall-increased, so did the amount of shared memory and the shared organization of memories. These findings reveal the interconnected relationship between collaborative inhibition, retrieval disruption, shared memory, and shared organization. Together, these relationships have intriguing implications for research across a wide variety of domains, including the formation of collective memory, beliefs and attitudes, parent-child narratives and the development of autobiographical memory, and the emergence of shared representations in educational settings.

The influence of learning methods on collaboration: prior repeated retrieval enhances retrieval organization, abolishes collaborative inhibition, and promotes post-collaborative memory.

Research on collaborative memory has unveiled the counterintuitive yet robust phenomenon that collaboration impairs group recall. A candidate explanation for this collaborative inhibition effect is the disruption of people's idiosyncratic retrieval strategies during collaboration, and it is hypothesized that employing methods that improve one's organization protects against retrieval disruption. Here it is investigated how one's learning method during the study phase--defined as either repeatedly studying or repeatedly retrieving information--influences retrieval organization and what effects this has on collaborative recall and post-collaborative individual recall. Results show that repeated retrieval consistently eliminated collaborative inhibition. This enabled participants to gain the most from re-exposure to materials recalled by their partners that they themselves did not recall and led to improvements in their individual memory following collaboration. This repeated retrieval advantage stemmed from the preferential manner in which this learning method strengthened retrieval organization. Findings are also discussed that reveal a relationship between retrieval organization and the interaction observed between learning method and short versus long delay seen in the testing effect literature. Finally, results show that the elusive benefits of cross-cuing during collaboration may be best detected with a longer study-test delay. Together, these findings illuminate when and how collaboration can enhance memory.