‘Tell me about the time you remember the best’: the effect of a remember best prompt on adults’ reports of a repeated emotionally stressful event

ABSTRACT

In two experiments we investigated the effect of a ‘remember best’ prompt on recall of one instance of a repeated event. Adult female participants (N = 98 Experiment 1; N = 100 Experiment 2) engaged in imagined experiences of abusive relationship encounters on either one occasion (single group) or four occasions (repeat-last and repeat-best groups). Participants then completed a memory assessment for the target instance. In the single and repeat-last groups, participants recalled a pre-determined target instance (i.e. last instance for repeat-last group), while the repeat-best group self-selected which instance to discuss (i.e. the time they ‘remember best’). In Experiment 1, repeat-best participants selected an instance based on when it occurred, while in Experiment 2, participants identified and uniquely labelled the instance remembered best. Experiment 1 results revealed that the ‘remember best’ prompt was not effective in enhancing accurate retrieval of one instance, while the ‘remember best’ prompt in Experiment 2 did appear to enhance retrieval when compared to the control groups. These findings suggest that accurate retrieval of one instance of a repeated event might depend on how memory is cued. The forensic implications of these findings for testimonies of repeated abuse (e.g. domestic abuse) are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• repeated events
• remember best
• repeated abuse

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Materials and Preregistered. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/b79ad/ and Experiment 1: osf.io/ugw8d and Experiment 2: osf.io/bewyt.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 In the literature on memory for repeated events, memory accuracy can be defined narrowly and/or broadly (Dilevski et al., 2020b; Price et al., 2016; Woiwod et al., 2019). A narrow definition of memory accuracy captures an individual’s ability to correctly attribute experienced details to specific instances, while a broad definition of accuracy captures an individual’s ability to remember experienced details regardless of when they occurred (i.e., the particular instance). Because we are interested in an individual’s ability to particularise one instance of a repeated event, we will focus our discussion on a narrow definition of memory accuracy.

2 In the pre-registration, we indicated that we had already started collecting data at the time of the registration. To clarify, we had only collected data from three participants at the time of registration and had not yet viewed or analysed the data. Furthermore, we indicated in the pre-registration that random allocation would not be possible. However, once data collection began, we were able to randomly allocate to group.

3 As noted in the pre-registration, we had intended to ask participants to complete a second memory report three-months after their first report. However, we were not able to collect data for a second memory report because most participants indicated that they would not be available to do so.

4 Some participants provided more than one reason for their selection hence why the number of responses is more than the number of participants in the repeat-best group.

5 Because of small cell sizes, we could not compare memory performance between each domestic abuse encounter. Instead, for participants in the repeat-best group, we compared memory performance between the dinner at the restaurant encounter to the average of the other three encounters. The analyses revealed that across all the memory measures, there was no significant differences between dinner at the restaurant encounter and all the other encounters, all Fs < 2.83, all ps > .10 (descriptive statistics and statistical analyses are reported in Table S2 in the supplemental file). While these findings suggest that memory performance for those that nominated dinner at a restaurant as the time they remembered best was no different to those that selected one of the other encounters, caution should be taken in interpreting the findings given the small sample size.