Feature and order manipulations in a free recall task affect memory for current and future lists

Abstract

We perceive, interpret, and remember ongoing experiences through the lens of our prior experiences. Inferring that we are in one type of situation versus another can lead us to interpret the same physical experience differently. In turn, this can affect how we focus our attention, form expectations about what will happen next, remember what is happening now, draw on our prior related experiences, and so on. To study these phenomena, we asked participants to perform simple word list-learning tasks. Across different experimental conditions, we held the set of to-be-learned words constant, but we manipulated how incidental visual features changed across words and lists, along with the orders in which the words were studied. We found that these manipulations affected not only how the participants recalled the manipulated lists, but also how they recalled later (randomly ordered) lists. Our work shows how structure in our ongoing experiences can influence how we remember both our current experiences and unrelated subsequent experiences.