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Investigating the differential dffects of narrativization and causal structure of stories on memory

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Savannah Born¹ (), Zachariah Reagh; ¹Washington University in St. Louis

Narratives are an effective stimulus-type for studying memory, as they can closely replicate how we use our memories in daily life. A key feature of narratives is the cause-and-effect structure between events, and previous research has found that events that are part of a causal chain are more often remembered and rated as important compared to events that are not part of a causal chain. However, there has not been a systematic investigation of the effects of varying narrativity and causality across a stimulus yet. This study aimed to address this gap by manipulating two factors: 1) the narrative vs expository style of a text, and 2) the cause-and-effect structure of events within a text. Participants were introduced to four stories, and asked to freely recall them. The stories were developed to follow a 2x2 factorial design, being high or low in narrativity, and high or low in causal structure. High narrativity, but not causality, significantly predicted increased recall word count and number of verified recollected details. Exploratory analysis investigating if causally or semantically central information was most frequently recalled did not find significant results. These results suggest that narrativized information benefits memory independently of causal structure. In future work, we intend to replicate this investigation with a new set of stories.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic