Participants’ and observers’ memory for conversational behavior

This study investigated four hypotheses concerning conversational memory: (1) participants remember more conversational information than observers, (2) participants rely more than observers on memory for specific conversational episodes and less on verbal implicit theories of communication behavior, (3) observers remember more verbal information than nonverbal (when that information is elicited verbally), and (4) observers’ recognition of specific communication behavior is more accurate than frequency estimates of similar behaviors. Each hypothesis was confirmed, which calls into question the practice of generalizing results from studies of observers to conversational participants.