Of sports and politics: Predicting category-specific retention of news events from demographic variables

Abstract

Many tests of retrograde amnesia consist of questions on news events. It is therefore important to know how such questions are answered by normal adults. We analysed the retention of news events in a sample of 12,913 participants, who provided basic demographic information and subsequently answered questions about news events randomly sampled from a database. We investigated whether demographic variables could predict differences in the intake and retention of news from several categories, such as sports and business news. Although demographic variables did affect general performance on news questions, differential effects on specific categories were marginal. Gender influenced performance on questions about business news, both age and educational attainment affected performance on political news, and educational attainment also had an effect on performance on science news.

Keywords:

• Episodic memory
• Forgetting
• Public events
• Retrograde amnesia

Notes

¹This criterion is as arbitrary as the conventional threshold on p-values of .05. We also contemplated criteria on other measures, most notably on the percentage of trials classified correctly with help of the regression line. A criterion of an increase in this percentage of at least 1% led to virtually the same results as those using our criterion on R ². Both criteria separate predictors with a large, medium, or small effect from those with an extremely small, but in our dataset nevertheless significant, effect.