Causal connections, not time, shaped memory for the 2016 election

Memory for a real-world event that unfolded over many months was shaped far more by the event’s role in a causal story than by how much time had passed, according to a study of recall for the 2016 US presidential election published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.

Dani Parra, Colleen A. Bartlett, Karl Healey and Gabriel A. Radvansky asked people to recall election-related news stories and to write brief headlines about them. The study assessed memory in terms of the amount of time that had passed since an event and the degree to which that event was causally integrated into the larger story.

The dataset came from 944 participants and covered 1115 distinct news events. Each event was coded for temporal delay and for the number of causal connections it had to other events in the unfolding narrative.

The researchers used negative binomial regression to examine how these two factors influenced memory.

The result was, by the authors’ own description, surprising. The amount of time that had passed had little impact on memory overall, even though prior work has shown that memory typically gets worse over time. In contrast, the number of causal connections was significantly related to memory.

Memory was driven more by the number of causal consequences that followed from an event than by the causal antecedents that preceded it, although antecedents had some influence as well. In other words, events that set later events in motion were remembered better than events whose significance lay mainly in what came before them.

The study was designed to test whether principles derived from laboratory research on narrative memory apply to a single, large, authentic story experienced in everyday life. Prior basic research has typically relied on small, experimenter-derived narratives that participants read and are tested on within a one-hour laboratory session. The current study instead examined memory for a story that played out over many months through a variety of news outlets.

Some laboratory-derived principles carried over, and others did not. The role of narrative causal connectivity among story events, meaning how some events caused other events, did influence performance. The forgetting curve, however, played a much more minor role, at least within the context of the narrative itself.

The authors suggest that for complex, long-term narratives, even those that play out over many months, the role that events play in a narrative’s causal structure are better predictors of memory than temporal distance. This provides insight, they write, into how people remember the autobiographical and societal stories they experience in their lives.

The article was published on 21 October 2026 as an open-access original article, shared early to provide faster access to peer-reviewed, accepted research, with a version subject to further edits before the final Version of Record.

Subject of Research: Memory for real-world news events from the 2016 US presidential election, focusing on causal connectivity and retention interval.

Article Title: Retention intervals, causal connections, and the 2016 election

Article References: Parra, D., Bartlett, C. A., Healey, K., & Radvansky, G. A. (2026). Retention intervals, causal connections, and the 2016 election. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-026-00762-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s41235-026-00762-6

Keywords: memory, narrative memory, causal connectivity, 2016 election, retention interval, forgetting curve, news events, negative binomial regression, event cognition, autobiographical memory, Retention, intervals