Episodic features of collective and vicarious memories

Abstract

The classical episodic-semantic memory distinction states that a memory should be directly experienced to be considered as episodic memory. However, a number of researchers claim that the episodic-semantic distinction is insufficient to classify indirectly experienced vivid events but there were not many empirical studies testing their claims. To fill that gap, in two experiments I analyzed indirectly experienced events and their phenomenological features such as vividness, sense of reliving, intensity of emotions and their possibility of causing physical reactions. I hypothesized that indirectly experienced events with strong phenomenological qualities exist and that these qualities could be predicted with personal functions such as preserving self continuity and with political functions, such as understanding the world. The first study (N = 440 events) was focused on collective memories and the second study was focused on (N = 332 events) vicarious memories. In both studies, participants wrote five memories which could be directly or indirectly experienced and evaluated the most and the least important memories among those five memories. Our data revealed that people reported indirectly experienced memories with high phenomenological features and that these features are positively predicted by the personal and political functions of the memories. I argue that my results show that the dichotomous episodic-semantic memory distinction is insufficient and that we need a multi-dimensional continuous model to better classify and understand memories.