The influence of social content on episodic memory retrieval

Abstract

Episodic memory helps facilitate navigation of the social world. Yet, whether social content is prioritized in episodic memory is unclear. Testing whether social elements are prioritized when retrieving multielement episodes used for social and nonsocial inferences, online volunteers encoded episode triplets comprising a location, activity, and a clique (i.e., social group) that related to a cue that was either a person or an object. Subsequent associative memory tests in all tasks revealed some form of enhanced retrieval for activity pairings with cliques. Additionally, social cover task contexts further boosted retrieval of social event content linked to the same cue. Computational modeling of retrieval response times revealed that these effects were consistent with more holistic retrieval of event triplets when retrieving social content. These results imply that social content can hold a privileged role over other event details in episodic memory, while offering a putative mechanism for social prioritization in episodic memory processes.