Prioritization of social content for episodic memory-guided decisions

Episodic memory helps facilitate navigation of the social world. Yet, whether social content is prioritized when making decisions involving episodic memory is unclear. Testing whether social elements are prioritized when retrieving multi-element episodes used for social and non-social decision-making, online volunteers encoded episode triplets comprising a location, activity, and a clique (i.e. social group) that related to a decision cue that was either a person or an object. Subsequent associative memory tests in all tasks revealed enhanced recall for activity pairings with cliques. Additionally, social decision task contexts further boosted recall of social event content linked to the same decision cue. Computational modeling of retrieval response times revealed that these effects were consistent with more holistic pattern completion-like retrieval of event triplets when recalling social content. These results imply that social content holds a privileged role over other event details in episodic memory, while offering a putative mechanism for social prioritization in episodic memory processes.