They saw a movie: Long-term memory for an extended audiovisual narrative
Abstract
We measured long-term memory for a narrative film. During the study session, participants watched a 27-min movie episode, without instructions to remember it. During the test session, administered at a delay ranging from 3 h to 9 mo after the study session, long-term memory for the movie was probed using a computerized questionnaire that assessed cued recall, recognition, and metamemory of movie events sampled ∼20 sec apart. The performance of each group of participants was measured at a single time point only. The participants remembered many events in the movie even months after watching it. Analysis of performance, using multiple measures, indicates differences between recent (weeks) and remote (months) memory. While high-confidence recognition performance was a reliable index of memory throughout the measured time span, cued recall accuracy was higher for relatively recent information. Analysis of different content elements in the movie revealed differential memory performance profiles according to time since encoding. We also used the data to propose lower limits on the capacity of long-term memory. This experimental paradigm is useful not only for the analysis of behavioral performance that results from encoding episodes in a continuous real-life-like situation, but is also suitable for studying brain substrates and processes of real-life memory using functional brain imaging.
Footnotes
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↵4 Corresponding author.
↵4 E-mail yadin.dudai{at}weizmann.ac.il; fax (972) 8-946-9244.
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.550407
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5 When compared in isolation using a two-tailed t-test, the difference between the 9-mo and the No-Movie group was significant, P = 0.017.
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6 A caveat is appropriate concerning the use of the term recognition to designate the second reply mode in our test. By definition, recognition is the judgment of previous occurrence of the on-line item (Dudai 2002). In our protocol, the stimuli in the movie are audiovisual, whereas the test provides two written reply options. Hence, this mode of reply might also be considered as option-restricted or option-guided cued recall. However, since we considered the alternative choices as providing the opportunity to recognize the content of the specific event in the movie, and since the term recognition is sometimes generalized in the human memory literature to mean content recognition rather than exact modality-specific recognition, we selected the term recognition to distinguish the more extensively guided mode of reply from the initial recall opportunity.
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- Received February 7, 2007.
- Accepted May 1, 2007.
- Copyright © 2007, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
