Social Interaction Affects Memory

"Memory isn't just a mechanism for storing all of the information you encounter. Instead, it helps you to hold onto information that is likely to be useful for reducing effort in the future. That is why, for example, when you work hard on something, you're more likely to remember it later. Memory encoding mechanisms use that effort as a signal that learning something about the situation will probably make it easier to deal with a similar situation in the future."

"One type of information that may be useful for guiding what to remember is social information. Suppose you encounter two people standing in a train station looking in different directions. Is it worth remembering that they were standing next to each other? Now, think about two people in that same train station having a friendly conversation. It probably seems more likely to be useful to remember that these two people were standing together than to remember the people staring in different directions."

Memory stores information that is likely to be useful for reducing future effort. Encoding prioritizes items associated with greater effort because effort signals that learning could ease similar future situations. Social information can guide memory selection, with interacting people more likely to be encountered together later. An experiment presented pairs of faces either facing each other or facing away while participants performed simple perceptual or judgment tasks. After a short delay, a surprise memory test compared recognition of original face pairs versus recombined pairs. Results showed better memory for face pairs that were interacting (facing each other) than for non-interacting pairs.

Read at Psychology Today