Strategic learning of people's names as a function of expected utility in young and old adults

People’s names are notoriously challenging to learn at all ages, more so than semantic information. Because people are somewhat aware of memory limitations and of their own difficulty of learning names, they might spontaneously use cost-efficient encoding strategies whereby they devote more memory resources to the names of people that are most likely to be useful to learn than others. To test this hypothesis, we told young and older participants that they would judge excerpts of a new TV series about a group of twelve musicians and that they could first review information about the characters to facilitate the upcoming viewing, which consisted of face-name-instrument triplets. Further, the probability of appearance of each character was specified via an importance label (main or secondary characters, bit parts). Participants then performed a surprise cued recall test and recalled names, instruments and importance labels associated with pictures. Unsurprisingly, young adults had better memory performance than older ones and semantic information was better recalled than names. In line with a cost-efficient encoding strategy, participants in both groups recalled names and semantic information of the most important characters better, suggesting they had prioritised encoding information about those characters to the detriment of others. Interestingly, there were individual differences in spontaneous encoding strategies used. People who reported using cost-efficient strategies had better memory performance than others and individuals who remembered more semantic information about main characters than about bit parts also did so with names, suggesting that cost-efficient strategies improves the encoding of two types of information.