In this study, the influence of two types of language on memory
for object location was investigated: demonstratives (this, that)
and possessives (my, your). Participants read instructions
(containing this/that/my/your/the) to place objects at different
locations. They then had to recall those object locations.
Experiments 1 and 2 tested the contrasting predictions of two
possible accounts of language on memory: the expectation
model (Coventry, Griffiths, & Hamilton, 2014) and the
congruence account (Bonfiglioli, Finocchiaro, Gesierich,
Rositani, & Vescovi, 2009). In Experiment 3, the role of
attention as a possible mechanism was investigated. The results
across all three experiments show striking effects of language
on object location memory; objects in the “that” and “your”
condition were misremembered to be further away than objects
in the “this” and “my” condition. The data favored the
expectation model: expected location cued by language and
actual location are concatenated leading to (mis)memory for
object location.