Recollection of repeated events: Difficulties and possibilities

Abstract: Survey based research about self-reported incidents and legal investigations concerning sexual abuse, terrorism, and refugee status determination often involves reporting about self-experienced events that are similar to each other and has occurred repeatedly. Such repeated events tend to be recalled in a general manner and as a cluster of events. It can therefore be difficult for a respondent or witness to specify which individual episode a particular detail belongs to and to describe the individual episodes in detail. The overall aims of the present thesis were to investigate whether peoples’ memories of repeated events can be improved by mnemonics and how memory specificity should be measured. Two studies were conducted and both were based on interviews with 95 dental care patients about all dental visits they had made during the past ten years. Objective truth was established by analysing their dental records. Both studies employed two measures of memory specificity (number of individual events recalled and recalled amount of details about the events). Amount of details was measured by categorising the respondents’ utterances as generic, specific, or specific-extended in line with established coding procedures for measuring overgeneral memory. Study I investigated the effect of context-specific cues on peoples’ ability to remember individual events and details about the events. The main results showed that context-specific cues tended to be more effective for recollection of individual events than cues commonly used in legal practice. The context-specific cues did also generate somewhat more details than the comparison cues. The results imply that recollection of repeated events can be enhanced by mnemonics such as context-specific cues. Study II showed that the two measures of memory specificity (i.e., number of individual events recalled and recalled amount of details about the events) were influenced differently by all five investigated factors (interviewees’ age, number of experienced events, interviewer, perceived unpleasantness concerning the events, and how much the interviewee had rehearsed their memories). For instance, number of experienced events positively influenced the number of events recalled but had no effect on the amount of details. It was additionally found that the respondents often underestimated how many visits they had made. An important implication of the study is that future research should make clear distinctions between the two types of memory specificity. In sum, the studies suggest that mnemonics can aid recollection of repeated events, although the research on the subject has methodological issues that need to be resolved.