Remembering the Leaders of China

Abstract

In two studies, we examined Chinese students’ memory for the names of the leaders of China. In Study 1, subjects were cued with the names of periods from China’s history. Subjects listed as many leaders as possible from each period and put them in the correct ordinal position when they could (see Roediger and DeSoto, 2014). Results showed that within each period, a primacy effect and sometimes a recency effect emerged. Moreover, the average recall probability for leaders within a specific period was a function of the ordinal position of the period. In Study 2, we asked another group of subjects to identify the sources through which they were able to recall each leader. We found that most subjects remembered leaders due to class and coursework. We also found a relation between a leader’s recall probability and the amount of information available on that leader on the Internet. Our findings further imply that the serial position function captures the form of collective memory.

Maradona in our minds: Memory for the FIFA World Cup reveals common effects between individual and collective memories.

“…In addition, memory for the first World Cup (1930) was higher than the subsequent tournaments, thus suggesting a primacy effect. Similar findings were reported for the knowledge of US presidents and leaders of China (Fu et al, 2016;Roediger & DeSoto, 2014), where the most recent ones revealed a higher memory accuracy, thus showing that subjects within a community recall events in a similar way. In addition, we found that subjects were able to recall specific details for each FIFA tournament edition, but the number of keywords (details) were above the mean for the first and last tournaments, indicating both a primacy and a recency effect, beyond the serial position effect, we found other peaks of recall (corresponding to 1930, 1978, 1986, 1990 and 2014) both in recognition and detail memory, which correlated with Argentina final position (playing or winning the final), supporting the idea that the importance and significance of an event influences its memorability (Rathbone et al, 2017;Rubin & Umanath, 2015).…”

“…Importantly, the building blocks of this shared knowledge are individual memories with their own set of rules and boundaries. A series of recent studies in collective memories (Fu, Xue, DeSoto, & Yuan, 2016;Roediger & DeSoto, 2014;Roediger III & DeSoto, 2016) showed common memory traits typically described in the psychological literature of individual memory, such as the serial position effect, the distinctiveness effect (von Restorff effect), the forgetting function and the false fame effect. For example, the study of Roediger and DeSoto (Roediger & DeSoto, 2014) analyzed presidential-recall tests performed to three generations of undergraduate college students (1974, 1991 and 2009).…”

Recognizing the Presidents

“…The theoretical conclusions of the study have been disputed, but the general findings have always been replicated (e.g., Crowder, 1993;Healy, Havas, & Parker, 2000;Healy & Parker, 2001;Kelley, Neath, & Surprenant, 2013;Neath, 2010;: In every era in which presidential recall has been measured, only about half of the presidents have been recalled. Other studies have shown similar types of forgetting for public knowledge that was well known at one time (Fu, Xue, DeSoto, & Yuan, 2016;Rubin, 1998Rubin, , 2014.…”

How fleeting is fame? Collective memory for popular music

“…We interpret these findings to mean that collective memory for popular music-and perhaps for cultural artifacts in general-is different than that for political leaders, be they in the United States (Roediger & DeSoto, 2014) or China (Fu et al, 2016). There are two important differences.…”

“…However, it is largely unknown how much history people remember. Cognitive psychologists have begun to investigate this question in studies that probe collective memory of political leaders both in the United States (Roediger & DeSoto, 2014) and in China (Fu et al, 2016). Results support the existence of a serial position effect (Murdock, 1962) in collective memory, in which the recency portion shows a linear decline.…”