Social content is prioritized in episodic memory

Abstract

Episodic memory helps facilitate navigation of the social world. Yet, whether social content is prioritized in episodic memory is unclear. Testing whether social elements are prioritized when retrieving multi-element episodes during social and non-social decision-making tasks, online volunteers encoded episode triplets comprising a location, activity, and a social group that related to a decision cue that was either a person or an object. Subsequent associative memory tests in all tasks revealed enhanced recall, but longer response times, for activity pairings with the social groups compared to locations. Additionally, social decision task contexts further boosted recall of social event content linked to the same decision cue. Computational modeling revealed that these effects were consistent with more holistic pattern completion-like retrieval of event triplets when recalling social content. These results highlight the primacy of social content in episodic memory, while offering a putative mechanism for social prioritization in episodic memory processes.