Media release

From: Society for Neuroscience

Exploring how storytelling strategies shape memories

When people recall events from a story detailed with personal interpretations or emotions, this triggers different memory mechanisms than when they recall the same story that instead emphasized external, more concrete, elaborative details.

Does the way a person hears about an event shape their recollection of it later? Signy Sheldon and colleagues, from McGill University, explored whether different storytelling strategies affect how the brain stores that experience as a memory and recalls it later.

The researchers created narratives with the same core events, but different elaborative details. These elaborations had two different focuses: (1) conceptual details, which describe a person’s feelings and interpretations while experiencing core events, and (2) perceptual details, such as a person’s concrete observations about core events. Neuroimaging revealed that when the 35 study participants remembered the stories later, different memory networks in the brain were involved. Notably, the distinct conceptual and perceptual brain networks that were active while listening to these different types of stories could predict how well participants later recalled the core elements of the story.

This study suggests that how people hear about an event shapes the way their brain makes a memory of that experience. Sheldon elaborates on what this could mean: “There is a lot of work in the field to show that individuals and groups prefer different memory systems. For example, older adults tend to engage the conceptual memory system more than younger adults, who prefer to engage the perceptual memory system when experiencing an event. This would mean that older adults may process events described with conceptual details better than younger adults. If this is the case, this could help us tailor information to different age groups to improve memory. This is something we are hoping to test in the future.”