Abstract
Competition during encoding enhances memories. However, little is known about how the anticipation of victory in a competition affects the memory enhancement. In addition, evidence regarding the individual difference of the effect is still unavailable. The current study investigated these issues. In this study, participants learned words in two conditions of competition including the high and low anticipation of victory (HA and LA), and then recognized the words. The achievement motivation in a competition was also evaluated in each participant. Results demonstrated that the memory enhancement by the competitive encoding was identified only in memories encoded by HA, and that the enhancement was significant only in participants who have high achievement motivation of competition. These findings suggest that the memory enhancement by a competition could be effective only when the victory was highly anticipated, and that the effect could be modulated by the individual difference of motivation for a victory.
