How do we evaluate and learn from others’ memories?

A fundamental question regarding the human mind is how we derive knowledge from others’ episodic memories, to learn about things we did not experience directly. This learning is vital for understanding the world around us and guides our actions and decisions. We propose a novel framework to investigate how people learn from others' episodic memories, hypothesizing that in such learning, people take an evaluative stance to avoid acquiring misleading information. Information evaluated as more veridical will be more likely to be learned from. We review the cues used to evaluate others’ memories. These cues may be conveyed and interpreted automatically (e.g., various aspects of prosody), or more deliberatively (e.g., description of recollective content, overt metacognitive claims of certainty or specificity).