Strategic learning of people’s names as a function of expected utility in young and older adults

ABSTRACT

People’s names are challenging to learn at all ages. Because people somewhat know this, they might spontaneously use cost-efficient encoding strategies and devote more resources to learn names that are most likely to be useful. To test this hypothesis, we created a pseudo-incidental learning situation in which young and older participants were exposed to 12 characters from a TV show and reviewed face-name-instrument triplets. Characters’ probability of appearance was specified via importance labels (main or secondary characters, bit parts). A surprised cued recall test showed that young adults performed better than older ones, and that semantic information was better recalled than names. Consistent with cost-efficient encoding strategies, participants in both groups recalled names and semantic information about most important characters better. Interestingly, there were large individual differences: people who reported using cost-efficient strategies performed better. At the individual level, memory advantages for most important characters’ names and semantic information correlated.

KEYWORDS:

• Aging
• memory
• learning
• naming
• cost-efficiency

Author Notes

Pre-registration of the study design and analyses plans are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/ktjyb Dataset is available on https://osf.io/e5t94/ We posted a draft of our manuscript on the preprint server PsyArXiv under the following URL https://psyarxiv.com/38fcv/ on 27 September 2023. We presented part of this research at the annual meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Science in Mons (Belgium), May 2023.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The exact instructions were: “We would like to have your opinion on some aspects of a Belgian (French-speaking) series currently in pre-production. Each short episode (about 6 to 8 minutes long) tells the story of a dozen friends who have decided to form a band that plays, for better or for worse, different types of music. They play jazz, rock, pop and world music. The series presents, in a rather humorous way, these twelve people in their daily life through their love stories, their friendship, their professional life and, of course, their musical practice. To make it easier for you to watch some excerpts from the episode mock-ups, we will start by introducing the different characters so that you can learn useful information about them at your convenience.

Now you will see the faces of the twelve characters appear on the screen (side and front photos). Each face will be accompanied by an information sheet containing their first name and the musical instrument played in the band. Before the presentation of each of these characters, their importance in the series will also be specified: “main character” (appears in every episode), “secondary character” (appears in about half of the episodes) or “bit parts” (small role in a few episodes). You will have a maximum of 10 seconds per character to read their sheet. If you want to move on to the next character before the 10 seconds are up, you can press the space bar.”

2. Although there was no delay between the encoding and testing phases, participants had to read precise instructions about the memory task and the response modality (i.e., 136 words in total). Further, the experimenter interacted with participants to ensure that all instructions were clear. This interval thus ensures that we were testing long-term memory without contamination from items remaining in working memory.

3. We realized far into data collection that answers to that question would not be usable as we did not specifically asked participants if they had understood our genuine aim before being exposed to the cued recall phase.

4. Distribution of participants in the four subgroups was as follow: Did not use importance labels and did not expect to see episodes, N = 14; Did not use importance labels and expected to see episodes, N = 31; Used importance labels and did not expect to see episodes, N = 3; Used importance labels and expected to see episodes, N = 24.

5. Note that the Type of information could not be taken into account here, since roles, names, and instruments all appeared within the same learning event.