How do we evaluate and learn from others’ memories?

Humans have the highly adaptive ability to learn from others’ memories. However, because memories are prone to errors, for others’ memories to be a valuable source of information, we need to assess their veracity. I have proposed a novel framework to investigate the mechanism underlying how people learn from others' episodic memories. I posit that in such learning people take an evaluative stance to avoid acquiring misleading information: information evaluated or perceived as more veridical will be more likely to be learned from. Because the primary vehicle for sharing and evaluating memories is captured in the content and character of natural language reports, this line of research makes use of cutting-edge Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. I will present this framework, followed by empirical work looking at (1) how humans assess others’ memories and how their assessments differ from those of language models; (2) how humans learn from others’ episodic memories; and (3) how forgetting affects the language through which memories are communicated.
 

Alternate locations:

Online: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/88523051719