Effects of Presentation Order and Delay on Recall of Narrative Details

Abstract

Recalling stories relies on episodic memory. According to the Process model of memory (Hasson, et al., 2015), there is no important difference between long term and short term episodic memory. This means that during narrative comprehension, online encoding and subsequent consolidation are part of the same process. To test this theory, we attempted to disrupt working memory (WM) after a story was heard and test whether this affected recall of that story. We hypothesized that in contrast to the Process theory, reconstructive processes relying on WM might be used to recall stories after the story is heard. Furthermore, if this were the case this would be more likely to occur when attempting to recall details of a scrambled story. We had participants listen to a series of brief narratives. Half of the stories are regular stories while the other half have a scrambled order. There were 6 blocks with different stories in each block. Narratives were all between 45-57 sentences. In a between-subjects design, one group (immediate, n=11), listened to stories and then went right into recall, while another group (delay, n=10) listened to the stories and then were asked to complete a complex spanWM task (strenuous delay) before completing recall. Preliminary results show that while encoding was made more difficult by scrambling the order of the story supported by worse recall scores, distracting subjects between the story and the recall did little to affect recall performance for both types of stories. This means that encoding of story information is likely happening online, and not using WM after the story is over.