Special Coverage

Using Emails to Quantify the Impact of Prior Exposure on Word Recognition Memory (27)

Hyungwook Yim, Courtney O'Brien, Benjamin Stone, Adam Osth, and Simon Dennis (The University of Melbourne)

Summary by Taylor Curley, Digital Content Associate Editor

Can the Content of Our Emails Hinder Future Memory?

Email is one of the most used communication tools of our time. But did you know that the contents of our emails can help us understand memory?

Hyungwook Yim and others examined two months of emails from 64 adults to measure the number of times a word is used (frequency) and when it is used (recency) affects memory. Words were characterized by their frequency, both across all participants and within each participant, and when each word was last used by each participant. Overall, as shown in the figures below, Kim and colleagues found that words often used and used more recently are recognized less (i.e., lower hit rates) than those not used often and not recently (i.e., higher hit rates). 

These results provide theoretical implications for long-term memory.

Researchers have separately shown that words not used often are easier to recognize than ones used often (the word-frequency effect). And there are decreases in memory for words related to interference stemming from the context in which the words were studied (the context noise account).

But these have yet to be considered simultaneously. The interaction between the frequencies of words in emails (word frequency) and when used (temporal context) in this study provides novel and naturalistic evidence for the context noise account of interference in memory.