CC BY 4.0 Attribution 4.0 InternationalWilson, Stuart2024-12-232024-12-232024-12-20Wilson, S. (2025) ‘The mnemonic potency of functional facts’, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 32(3), pp. 1352–1366. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02617-x.1069-9384https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/14102https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-024-02617-xStuart Wilson - ORCID: 0000-0003-2119-5209 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2119-5209Learning and remembering what things are used for is a capacity that is central to successfully living in any human culture. The current paper investigates whether functional facts (information about what an object is used for) are remembered more efficiently compared with nonfunctional facts. Experiment 1 presented participants with images of functionally ambiguous objects associated with a (made-up) name and a (made-up) fact that could relate either to the object’s function or to something nonfunctional. Results show that recall of object names did not depend on whether they were associated with a functional or nonfunctional fact, while recall of the functional facts was significantly better than the nonfunctional facts. The second experiment replicated this main effect and further found that functional facts are remembered more efficiently after they have been associated with confirmatory (as opposed to disconfirmatory) feedback. It is suggested that semantic information is not unitary, and that one way of categorising semantic information is in terms of its adaptive relevance. Potential mechanisms are proposed and discussed, along with suggestions for future research.1352–1366enOpen Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Functional MemorySemantic MemoryAdaptive MemoryCultural MemoryMnemonicsArticle