Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The mind is a prediction machine. In most situations in which it finds itself, it has expectations as to what mighthappen. But when people’s expectations are invalidated by experience, the memories that gave rise to these expectations aresuppressed. The present research explores the effect of these prediction errors on listener’s memories during social interaction.We reasoned that listening to a speaker recounting experiences similar to one’s own would trigger prediction errors on the part ofthe listener that would result in the suppression of his/her memories. Study 1 offers evidence for the effect of socially triggeredcontext based prediction errors on listener’s mnemonic representations. Study 2 replicates these findings and shows that thiseffect is sensitive to a perspective-taking manipulation. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for a yet unrecognizedphenomenon by which our conversations shape the memories that we come to hold.