Remembering the Presidents

Here we report research on how important historical figures—presidents of the United States—are remembered and forgotten. When students are given 5 min to recall presidents (in order, if possible), they remember the first few, the most recent, and Lincoln and his immediate successors better than the rest. When this study is done over time, a regular forgetting curve appears, allowing us to assess the rate of forgetting for more recent presidents. Some presidents (e.g., Kennedy) are being forgotten more slowly than others (e.g., Truman). People are more accurate in recognizing presidents than in recalling them, but they also show interesting false recognitions, identifying people such as Alexander Hamilton as a former president. Together, these studies provide a window into how groups of people remember salient figures from 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 material with a different type of memory test.