The influence of implicit motives on memory processes

Four studies tested the hypothesis that agentic and communal motives act as a channel for new knowledge and are linked to specific ways of organizing information that facilitate its accessibility. In Study 1, agentic and comm unal participants read an agentic or a communal vignette consisting of diff erentiated and integrated statements, performed a distraction task, then co mpleted written recall and recognition tasks. Agentics recalled and recogni zed more differentiation in the agentic story; communals recalled and recog nized more integration in the communal story. A computerized replication wi th randomized recognition items (Study 2) found the same pattern of recogni tion results. Studies 3 and 4 used implicit motive primes and found similar results in both written and computerized recognition tasks. These ways of organizing information have powerful implications for the encoding of autob iographical knowledge and its long-term organization.