Understanding other people relies on long-term memory: we use learned information about others' personalities, preferences, and personal histories to make inferences about the causes of their behavior. However, little is known about individual differences in memory for high-level social information. Here, we develop and psychometrically evaluate a behavioral measure of social memory from narrative video content. Participants (N = 103) watched the pilot episode of the TV show Friday Night Lights, and answered multiple choice questions about characters' actions, statements, inferred mental states, relationships, and personalities immediately after viewing and following a 21-day delay. To assess convergent and divergent validity of this measure, participants performed several additional tasks probing memory for other aspects of show content including face-name associations and face image recognition, as well as a standard measure of verbal episodic memory. Performance on the social memory task showed moderate split-half reliability, demonstrating feasibility as an individual difference measure. Memory for information about specific events in the narrative showed a decline across the delay, while memory for abstract information remained stable. Memory for different types of event-related information (actions, statements, and mental states) were correlated, providing evidence for a unified construct. Social memory performance was correlated with face-name association and verbal episodic memory, but not with face image recognition memory. These results provide a proof of concept for a novel behavioral measure of social memory and suggest that the measure relates to episodic and relational memory but not image recognition.
Marcus, T., Ross, D., Kolluru, R., Deen, B.
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