Can personal memories and fictional stories enhance retention of novel words and facts?

Two strategies that increase memory retention are the self-reference effect and generation effect. The generation effect involves the self generating the stimuli to-be-remembered. The self-reference effect involves knowledge about the self. Previous studies have compared the ‘self’ and ‘other’ conditions to determine whether a memory advantage exists. However, one novel way to compare these elements is directly comparing the ‘self’ and ‘other’ while also comparing effects of either asking participants to come up with an episodic AM or story narrative to associate with the to-be-remembered stimuli. Both studies in this dissertation had young adults complete two sessions separated by a two-day delay. Participants were divided into two groups: AM group and Story group. Each group learned adjective words (Study 1) or facts (Study 2) in conditions that differed in encoding task: baseline, self and other. Later, participants were tested on their retention of the words (Study 1) or facts (Study 2) using free recall and recognition subtasks. In both studies, memory performance was higher for all four experimental conditions compared to baseline. In Study 1 free recall subtask, recall of words was higher for AM group-self than Story group-self. However, no differences were found in recall between AM group-other and Story group-other. In Study 1 recognition subtask, there was a memory advantage for the self but no differences were found between AM and Story groups. In Study 2 free recall subtask, there were no differences in recall between the self and other conditions in the AM group. However, in the Story group, the number of facts recalled in the self condition was higher than the other condition. Moreover, in Study 2, recall of facts was higher for self condition in the Story group than AM group. In Study 2 recognition subtask, we found differences between AM and Story groups. These results can inform educators about strategies used to promote learning within the classroom.