A new model suggests we remember stories, like that of Romeo and Juliet, by using a tree-shaped mental framework. Oh, those star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet. Most of us can recount their story, even if we can’t recite any specific lines from the play. A new theory by Emory Physics Professor Tankut Can and his collaborators aims to explain our story-recalling ability by modeling the memory of a story as a hierarchical tree. The study was recently published in Physical Review Letters:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/g1cz-wk1l
The portion of the tree closest to the root consists of abstractions or summaries, which branch out into finer and finer details. The researchers who developed this model show that it reproduces statistical trends seen in an earlier study of human subjects recalling stories.
Read the full story here: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/117#c1