RECONSTRUCTIVE MEMORY IN THE DATING OF PERSONAL AND PUBLIC NEWS EVENTS

Two experiments investigated memory for the dates of events selected a nd recorded by subjects in diaries. In Experiment 1, personal events a nd public news events were compared, with retention time varying from 1 week up to 9 months. It was found that the day of the week was more accurately identified for personal events than for news events, that d ay-of-the-week (DOW) accuracy did not decrease with increasing retenti on time, and that memory of the personal context of both event types w as more important for DOW accuracy than was memory of the core of the events. These results support our view that memory of the day of the w eek is mainly reconstructed by reference to a temporal week schema bas ed on personal experiences! and that the relation of news events to th e week schema is mediated by memory of personal context. The distribut ion of DOW errors was modeled as the outcome of a process of guessing constrained by subdivisions of the week schema, without assuming any s pecial temporal memory trace. In Experiment 2, the model was shown to fit independently collected data from a different subject pool and cou ntry equally well.