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Poster C151 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
The Prioritization of Social Content in Episodic Memory
Ameer Ghouse1 (), Raphael Kaplan; 1Universitat Jaume I
Episodic memory helps facilitate navigation of the social world. Yet, whether social content is prioritized in episodic memory is unclear. We tested whether social content is prioritized in episodic memory-guided decision tasks. Online volunteers encoded episode triplets comprising a location, activity, and a social group that related to a decision stimulus. Subsequent associative memory tests revealed an enhanced recall, but longer response times, for activity pairings with the social group compared to the location. Additionally, memory-guided social decision-making selectively boosted the primacy of social information under more demanding retrieval conditions. Motivated by these results, we modeled how a bias term in signal detection theory would correspond to holistic pattern completion of triplets at recall as a function of response time. This revealed enhanced information pattern completion when recalling social-content. These results highlight the primacy of social content in episodic memory while offering a putative mechanism for how social content influences episodic memory processes.
Keywords: Episodic Memory Social Cognition Pattern Completion Signal Detection Theory