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This paper investigates the impact of first- and second-person pronoun insertion on news headline memorability using cognitive psychology experiment designs. Three controlled memorization experiments with 240 participants revealed mixed effects of pronoun insertion, varying based on headline topic and insertion context. The study also found that LLM-generated pronoun insertions often compromise content accuracy, emotion retention, or natural writing style, highlighting challenges in automated headline optimization.
Injecting "you" and "I" into news headlines doesn't guarantee better recall, and LLMs often butcher the job anyway.
For news headlines to influence beliefs and drive action, relevant information needs to be retained and retrievable from memory. In this probing study we draw on experiment designs from cognitive psychology to examine how a specific linguistic feature, namely direct address through first- and second-person pronouns, affects memorability and to what extent it is feasible to use large language models for the targeted insertion of such a feature into existing text without changing its core meaning. Across three controlled memorization experiments with a total of 240 participants, yielding 7,680 unique memory judgments, we show that pronoun insertion has mixed effects on memorability. Exploratory analyses indicate that effects differ based on headline topic, how pronouns are inserted and their immediate contexts. Additional data and fine-grained analysis is needed to draw definitive conclusions on these mediating factors. We further show that automatic revisions by LLMs are not always appropriate: Crowdsourced evaluations find many of them to be lacking in content accuracy and emotion retention or resulting in unnatural writing style. We make our collected data available for future work.