More confidence after choosing, but similar accuracy when remembering
Young adults felt more certain about their memories after making a choice themselves than after watching someone else choose. Overall accuracy was similar.
The key idea
Making a choice oneself went along with greater confidence when remembering, but not with greater overall accuracy.
The study, in plain language
Do we remember something better because we chose it? The team tested this intuition with young adults who alternated between deciding whether to bet and observing someone else’s decisions. Images appeared during the task, and participants had to recognize them later.
Overall accuracy showed no visible difference between learning by choosing and learning by observing, although people reported greater confidence in their memories after making a choice. There was a nuance: more of the images shown after choosing to bet were recognized, while false alarms showed no visible difference.
Expectations about the images were also included in the analysis: a measure of the distance between what was expected and what appeared went along with later memory. The task made it possible to examine separately what people chose, what they expected to see, and how confident they felt when later recognizing an image, without showing that one caused another.
What they found
- Overall accuracy was similar after making a choice and after observing.
- People reported greater confidence in their memories after making their own decisions.
- Images shown after betting were recognized more often, without a visible change in false alarms.
How they studied it
Young adults alternated between deciding whether to bet on images and observing someone else’s decisions. They later completed a recognition test and rated their confidence. A total of 79 people were analyzed.
What the study cannot show
- The task was brief and artificial; betting and incidental images do not represent all learning or all social memory.
- The study does not show that observing and experiencing are equivalent in every setting or that betting improves everyday memory.
Something to think about
The next time you feel very sure about a memory, ask how much that confidence comes from the details and how much from having made the decision yourself.
The original study
Shared effects of one’s own and others’ experiences during reinforcement learning on episodic memory
Source under CC BY 4.0. English adaptation and explanation by PaperFlow, with AI assistance. The text has been reorganized for a general audience; it is not the complete paper and does not imply endorsement by its authors.
One study alone does not represent a field's consensus. Educational content does not replace professional advice. Report a possible error.
