Long-term memory for movie details: selective decay for verbal information at one week

ABSTRACT

Mnemonic representations of complex events are multidimensional, incorporating information about objects and characters, their interactions and their spatial–temporal context. The present study investigated the degree to which detailed verbal information (i.e., dialogues), as well as semantic and spatiotemporal (i.e., “what”, “where”, and “when”) elements of episodic memories for movies, are forgotten over the course of a week. Moreover, we tested whether the amount of dimension-specific forgetting differed as a function of the participant's age. In a mixed design, younger and middle-aged participants were asked to watch a ∼90 min movie and provide yes/no answers to detailed questions about different dimensions of the presented material after 1, 3 days, and 1 week. The results indicate that memory decay mainly affects the verbal dimension, both in terms of response accuracy and confidence. Instead, detailed information about objects/characters’ features and spatiotemporal context seems to be relatively preserved, despite a general decrease in response confidence. Furthermore, younger adults were in general more accurate and confident than middle-aged participants, although, again, the verbal dimension exhibited a significant age-related difference. We propose that this selective forgetting depends on the progressive advantage of visual compared to auditory/verbal information in memory for complex events.

KEYWORDS:

• Long-term forgetting
• verbal memory
• visual memory
• confidence
• middle age

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at Mendeley Data, doi: 10.17632/hchxvbtg2d.2.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at Mendeley Data. https://doi.org/10.17632/hchxvbtg2d.2.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant awarded to M. Frisoni from the BIAL Foundation [grant number 384/20] and was conducted under the framework of the Departments of Excellence 2018–2022 initiative of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research for the Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences (DNISC) of the University of Chieti-Pescara.