Familiarity and Personal Experience as Mediators of Recall When Planning for Future Contingencies

In this article, we demonstrate that planning tasks enhance recall when the context of planning (a) is self-referential and (b) draws on familiar scenarios represented in episodic memory. Specifically, we show that when planning tasks are sorted according to the degree to which they evoke memories o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Main Authors: Klein, Stanley B., Robertson, Theresa E., Delton, Andrew W., Lax, Moshe L.
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2011
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3302925
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21859232
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025200
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Summary:In this article, we demonstrate that planning tasks enhance recall when the context of planning (a) is self-referential and (b) draws on familiar scenarios represented in episodic memory. Specifically, we show that when planning tasks are sorted according to the degree to which they evoke memories of personally familiar scenarios (e.g., planning a picnic), recall is reliably superior to tasks that fail to do so (e.g., planning an Arctic trek). We discuss the implications of these findings for planning tasks and their relation to episodic memory.