The effects of scrambling episode components on memory for a picture story: not understanding, but recognizing what you saw

Abstract

How are episodes of picture stories remembered, and what role does the order of their components (exposition, complication, and resolution) play in that memory? We presented picture sequence episodes of the “Red Balloon” with the order of their components either normal or scrambled. As predicted by story grammar theories, scrambling episode components reduced self-rated comprehension and recall. However, scrambling also produced faster recognition memory responses for hits. This suggests that episode component scrambling interfered with the transformation of perceptual to conceptual information in LTM, producing an advantage for familiarity over recollection. Additionally, recall memory decreased monotonically from exposition to resolution, whereas recognition memory showed the opposite result, and this was the same whether components were normally ordered or scrambled. This suggests that memory for picture story episode components is based on their information content rather than their temporal order, and that information from picture stories moves from perceptual to conceptual memory representations.