13 - Remembering without experiencing: Memory for reported events

Summary

There is a class of real events that we know about and remember, though we have not experienced them. Learning about such events does not require clairvoyance or divine revelations, but only listening to a friend, reading a newspaper, or watching television. The fact is that we may know about real events in the world in two different ways, either by personal experience (directly, firsthand) or by the report of someone else (indirectly, secondhand). I shall call events that are known in these two ways experienced events and reported events, respectively. This chapter attempts, first, to demonstrate the pertinence of this distinction to research on real-event memory; second, to advance a theoretical analysis of memory of the two classes of events in terms of the information available to specify them; and, third, to examine some empirical results relevant to this analysis.

A little personal background is in order to set the topic and the approach in perspective. My interest in these issues stems from several years of research into memory for texts and particularly news reports (Larsen, 1983). News reports are different from the texts of most memory experiments because they are about real events and because they are important in everyday life. Therefore, news memory seemed to deserve a place in the emerging field of ecological memory research (Neisser, 1982a). But in this research the emphasis was heavily on autobiographical memory.