We have particularly good memory for stories about survival situations

What makes one story stick in our minds for years, but another disappear once we've closed the final page? A new study in Memory & Cognition has one answer: the nature of a character's plight can influence how well we're likely to remember the story. The team finds that we're better at recalling details of stories where characters are in survival situations, suggesting that such stories are particularly good at transporting us to their world.

Previous research has found that we are more likely to remember negative emotional events in stories, and that we have more vivid memories for negative events that have occurred in our own lives, presumably because remembering solutions for perilous situations may help us out in the future. However, most research on how survival situations could influence memory has largely focused on memory for lists of words, rather than information embedded in narratives. So Andrew Cook and colleagues from Binghamton University sought to explore what would happen when participants were asked to read stories that put characters in a survival situation.

First, the team replicated findings from previous studies using word lists. Participants either imagined that they had been stranded in some grasslands without any survival materials, or that they had moved to a new country and would be spending several months transporting belongings and buying new items. Both groups then saw a list of ten objects and were asked to think about how relevant each would be in the situation. Then, after completing a separate task for a few minutes, participants were given three minutes to remember as many of the words as they could. Similar to past work, those in the survival condition remembered more words than those in the moving condition.

The second study then looked at whether reading about characters trying to survive would also aid recall of the content of stories. Participants read one of two stories, in which a character was either stranded and trying to survive, or was moving house. In both scenarios, the character was described as being in immense heat and feeling exhausted, and a crucial line in both stories listed the objects in the character's backpack (these were the same as in the first study). Participants were then asked to recall the objects in the backpack, before indicating how interesting, emotionally intense, and threatening they found the story.

Again, participants remembered more objects when they had read the survival story than when they had read the moving story. They also found the survival story more interesting, more emotionally intense, and more threatening than the moving story.

The final study replicated the second, except the researchers also looked at whether survival stories similarly boosted memory for other details of the story such as the shoes the character was wearing. The narrative perspective of these stories we also changed from third to second person in order to make participants feel more immersed. Again, those who read the survival story remembered more of the objects in the backpack than those who read the moving story - and they also remembered more of the general story details. Readers of the survival story reported feeling more emotionally affected and threatened by the content than readers of the moving story.

Across studies, then, participants had better memory for the details of survival stories. The team suggests that this is because they embodied the character more in the survival story, and this left them more likely to recall details that might be relevant. Future research could compare survival stories to other types of story, or look at how different degrees of threat might influence our memories.