| Abstract: | This study investigated the very long-term retention of a full-length novel originally studied as part of a university undergraduate course. One hundred and forty former students completed three tests designed to assess retention of Charles Dickens' Hard Times. Retention intervals ranged from 3 to 39 months. Subjects' responses when they were asked to report their most vivid and enduring memory of the novel were consistent with story grammar models which claim that components of a story which are higher in a hierarchy are remembered better than those lower in the hierarchy. A free recall test of the names and roles of the characters in the novel found that retention of both declined rapidly in the first few months following acquisition, that names were forgotten more quickly than roles, and that retention of both had stabilized above baseline before the longest retention interval. These data are interpreted in terms of a schema account of memory retention, in which retention of schematic knowledge (roles), but not non-schematic knowledge (names) can be mediated by abstract knowledge structures. The results of a fact verification test showed that memory for events of high importance in the novel was better than memory for events of low importance, consistent with models that suggest that texts and stories are represented hierarchically in memory. Confidence ratings also declined over time and showed that subjects generally assessed the accuracy of their responses correctly. The significant predictors of memory for the novel were retention interval and the mark obtained on a coursework essay on Hard Times. |
