Effect of Food Nostalgia on Memory Accuracy and Memory Confidence
Previous studies indicated a complex non-linear relationship between memory confidence and memory accuracy (Wixted & Wells, 2017). Across multiple factors that influence memory accuracy, emotion is a significant one. The Fuzzy-trace theory (FTT) proposed our memory-encoding approaches as depending on verbatim traces, the very precise representations, or gist traces, the themes and meaning representations which are less accurate (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005). Evidence also suggests people’s increasing tendency to rely on gist traces when events are high-arousal and self-relevant (Reyna & Brainerd, 2012).As a distinct feature of autobiographical memory and bittersweet emotion, nostalgic memories show high content of personally meaningful moments and relationships with significant others (Jiang, et al., 2021). Food nostalgia memories highlight the tight correlation between memory and food which are found to be more familiar, more autobiographically related, and more arousing (Green et al., 2023). With limited studies on the effects of food nostalgia on the shaping of new memories as well as its accuracy and people’s confidence level towards it, our research aims to continually examine the role of food nostalgia on autobiographical memory while investigating how it shaped new memories and its role in the relationship between memory confidence and accuracy. We assessed participants' autobiographical memories, memory confidence, and memory accuracy through memory recall tasks and Recognition Memory Tests. The results indicated a significant effect of memory confidence on memory accuracy that the accuracy increases with higher confidence levels. Food nostalgia, on the other hand, exhibits a strong predictability on memory confidence as people tend to report a higher confidence level in those foods they rated as high nostalgic value but shows no effects on memory accuracy. This study connects autobiographical memory with food nostalgia and provides a new perspective on the impacts of food nostalgia on the confidence and accuracy of newly shaped memories.