2 - What is recollective memory?

Summary

The goal of this chapter is to describe recollective memory and give an account of some of the characteristics of this form of human memory. I take recollective memory to be the type of memory that occurs when an individual recalls a specific episode from their past experience. I start with this very loose definition because a large part of this chapter consists of an attempt to work out a more detailed and analytic description of this form of memory.

In an earlier chapter (Brewer, 1986), I attempted to describe the types of memory involved in the study of autobiographical memory. I argued that autobiographical memory was memory for information related to the self and that there were four basic forms of autobiographical memory. I organized these forms of memory in terms of their acquisition conditions (single instance versus repeated) and their form of representation (imaginal versus nonimaginal). I concluded that the phenomenally experienced product of a single episode is a personal memory (e.g., I can picture David Rubin sitting across from me at lunch in a cafe in Boulder, Colorado, last summer). The nonphenomenally experienced product of a single episode is an autobiographical fact (e.g., I can recall that I had lunch with David Rubin at the Meetings of the Cognitive Science Society last summer).