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Poster C156 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Self- versus other-generated interpretations of ambiguous social stimuli are asymmetrically remembered
Clara Sava-Segal1, Emily Finn1 (); 1Dartmouth College
Ambiguous social situations have a variety of possible interpretations, making them a rich testbed for studying biases in memory processing: people must integrate differing viewpoints of the same sensory information (e.g., their own versus someone else’s), ultimately affecting what they remember. Here we probed how individuals encode and remember their own subjective interpretations versus those sourced from others of the same ambiguous sensory input. We find that although the fidelity of both interpretations in memory is relatively high, people, even when confident in their reports, show a marked tendency to merge their memories of other’s interpretations to be more like their own original interpretation. This asymmetry suggests a cognitive preference for aligning external interpretations with one's own, extending the understanding of self-referential effects in memory and showing a memory bias towards self-generated narratives in ambiguous situations.
Keywords: memory social contexts naturalistic stimuli natural language processing