The influence of information generation on destination memory

Abstract

To remember to whom we transmit information, we rely on destination memory, with worse performance occurring when participants share personal facts (e.g., my age is . . .) compared with interesting ones (e.g., a shrimp’s heart is in its head). When reporting personal information, the internal attentional focus decreases the attentional resources available to associate that information with recipients, resulting in worse destination memory. Given that the poorer destination memory when participants transmitted personal facts was always compared with the transmission of interesting facts, in Experiment 1 (between-participants design: 41 participants) and Experiment 2 (within-participants design: 30 participants), we compared the generation and transmission of personal facts with the transmission of familiar proverbs. Again, the generation and transmission of personal facts hampered destination memory. Besides the type of information (personal vs. familiar proverbs), the conditions differed regarding the type of process (generation vs. transmission of information). To clarify the influence of generation on destination memory, in Experiment 3 ( N = 31), participants (1) transmitted and (2) generated and transmitted familiar proverbs, and significant differences in destination memory between the conditions was not observed. In general, our experiments seem to support the assumption that transmitting personal information leads to worse destination memory not because participants generated the information but because personal facts drive the attentional focus to the self.