Representing the collective past: public event memories and future simulations in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Common processes involved in remembering and predicting personal and public events have led researchers to study public events as a part of autobiographical memory. In the present study, we asked for past events and future predictions and examined the temporal distribution and factors that made these salient in event representations. A sample of 1577 individuals reported six most important public events since their birth and six future events that they expected. Past events mostly came from the recent past and were negative in valence. Similarly, future predictions consisted of negative events that are expected to occur in the near past. We did not find a reminiscence bump but there was a strong recency effect. Despite being inconsistent with some literature, this supports the view that remembering the past is largely influenced by the current goals and experiences. Also, in predicting what is remembered from the past and what is expected in the future, what individuals believed others would report appeared as a robust predictor.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• collective memory
• public event memories
• prospective memory
• reminiscence bump

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Before data collection, we conducted pilot testing with undergraduate students. In the survey we used in the pilot, 10 events were requested for both past and future events. However, one session lasted longer (approximately 75 minutes) and in their feedback, participants reported that they experienced difficulty to retrieve 10 specific events. When we examined the pilot data, there was a clear decline in the number of reported events after the 6th memory report for the past events and 4th reports for thefuture events. For that reason, we asked for particularly six events for both reports.

2 In the past events section, since participants reported events that occurred after their birth, we determined a time limit for future eventsto make a reliable comparison with past events.

3 We also examined the distribution of public event memories, using The Removing the Increased Recall of Recent Events model (RIRRE; Janssen, Gralak, & Murre, 2011) which estimates a retention function on the 10 recent years and applies this forgetting curve to remove the increased recall of recent events from the temporal distribution. The pattern of the distribution did not change, supporting the recency effect in the distribution of the public events in Turkey.

4 Bump analyses were conducted also for most frequently reported five individual events. Neither of the distributions yielded a reminiscence bump, but rather supported for a recency effect (Öner & Gülgöz, in preparation).