ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes some psychological research concerning memory for health information and events. It highlights some attempts to improve memory performance in the health domain. The chapter pays special attention to the improvement of health event memory among survey respondents. Research on health-related memory has focused on three content areas: doctor-patient communication, dietary behavior, and health events. The longest tradition of health memory research lies in the domain of physician-patient communication. P. Ley reviewed many of the studies of patients' memory for physician communications. A major challenge for health memory researchers is to combine the experimental control and theoretical rigor of the laboratory with the labor-intensive demands of the verification process. One approach to studying ways to improve memory is to first document the procedures that individuals use to recall certain material. This is the approach that has been used to study the role of retrieval order in event memory performance.
