Remembering the Presidents

We report research on how important historical figures—presidents of the United States—are remembered and forgotten. When students are given 5 minutes to recall presidents (in order, if possible), they remember the first few, the most recent, and Lincoln and his successors much better than the rest. When this kind of study is done over time, a regular forgetting curve appears, and this allows us to assess the rate of forgetting for more recent presidents. Some presidents (Kennedy, Nixon) are being forgotten more slowly than others (Truman, Ford). People are more accurate in recognizing presidents than in recalling them, but they also show interesting false recognitions, identifying people like Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin as having been president. This same pattern—greater accurate and false memory in recognition tasks compared to recall tasks—often occurs in memory for word lists, too. Together these studies provide a window into processes of collective remembering, how groups of people (in this case, Americans) remember salient events of their group’s past: its leaders. They also show that the effects derived from studying artificial materials in the lab may generalize more widely to other sorts of material with a different type of memory test.