Styles of Remembering and Types of Experience: An Experimental Investigation of Reconstructive Memory

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.

Naohisa MoriEmail:

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Naohisa Mori   is currently a professor of Human Sciences at Sapporo Gakuin University, who started his career as an experimental psychologist of memory. After receiving his master’s degree from Tsukuba University, he learnt the social nature of memory and became interested in the social and institutional constraints on remembering. He made some participated observation on a joint remembering in a small group. He has also been collaborating with lawyers in the examination of the credibility of confession and testimony. In this collaboration, he knew he had to study the veracity of an experience in remembering.