Abstract
No one can access the original events to examine the veracity of a human experience in everyday situations. The present experiment was done to compare two conditions under which a participant remembered (1) her actual contact with the environment and (2) her indirect experience—information about another person’s direct experience that was communicated to her. Several differences in the forms of remembering such as narrative styles, way of describing and naming of object, motive for actions—were found to differ between those two conditions. Those differences were shown to disappear with repeated remembering occasions due to intrapersonal and interpersonal conventionalization. These results suggest that it is possible to examine the veracity of an experience based on forms of remembering, rather than on its content. Theoretical discussion links the present experiment to the study of memory and remembering from the perspective of Bartlett’s (Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932) schema theory.
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Notes
Transition of events in the parentheses
References
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Acknowledgement
The author is indebted to Professor Nobusuke Shimizu of Hokusei Gakuen University and Professor Makiko Naka of Hokkaido University for their support to the present experiment. He is also grateful to Professor Kentaro Suzuki of Sapporo Gakuin University for his helpful suggestion to the data analysis and Professor David Dalsky of Kyoto University for his consultation of English writing.
The present study was done with the support of the 2003 Sapporo Gakuin University Research Support Grant.
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Mori, N. Styles of Remembering and Types of Experience: An Experimental Investigation of Reconstructive Memory. Integr. psych. behav. 42, 291–314 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-008-9068-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-008-9068-5