How We Recall Recurring Events
Katja Crone (TU Dortmund)
A great deal of philosophical and empirical work on memory focuses on what is called ‘episodic memory’: our memories of particular events from our past. Think, for instance, of the memory of having lunch with a friend last Wednesday at a café near your workplace. This is a memory of a specific occurrence: it happened in one place, at one time, and it involved some distinctive contextual features – what was on the menu, who sat where, precisely what was said.
However, many of the memories that occupy our everyday mental lives are not like this. Very often, we remember things that happened repeatedly: we remember our weekly soccer practices as a child, the daily bus ride to school, or the many times we met friends in our favorite bar. Sometimes we remember recurring celebrations – say, the annual birthday party of a close friend. When I recall my friend Hannah’s birthday party, which she celebrates every year, for example, what comes to mind is not one particular party at one particular moment in the past. What I mentally represent seems rather to be something less specific, without necessarily picking out any one party in the series.
These sorts of memories, which I call ‘generic memories’, have been surprisingly neglected by interdisciplinary memory research. They are not quite episodic memories (as they are not tied to one specific past event), yet they are also not simply part of what philosophers and psychologists call ‘semantic memory’ (our memory for factual knowledge and word meanings).
They seem to inhabit an interesting middle space. In what follows, I want to describe what is distinctive about these memories and explain how I think we should understand what is being represented in them. Understanding this helps us better appreciate the richness and flexibility of our personal memories – and it challenges certain overly narrow ways of thinking about how memory works.
The Puzzle of Generic Memory
Let us return to the birthday party example. Suppose I say, “I remember Hannah’s annual birthday party”. What comes to mind may be something like this: I see myself entering the familiar apartment, hearing lively conversation and music, and greeting several familiar faces.
These images can be vivid and sensory-rich. Their recall may also carry with them a characteristic phenomenology, such as a ‘feeling of pastness’.
However – and this is crucial – the recall does not seem to be of a particular party. Some details float. The party was usually held in early February, but once or twice it happened in April. Certain friends were usually there, but some years they were not. The mood was mostly good every year, but occasionally subdued. When I remember the party ‘in general’, I don’t focus on any one particular evening.
This gives rise to a philosophical tension: On the one hand, the content of such memories seems quite specific. Their recall involves imagery and perspective; they feel lived. On the other hand, they seem non-specific: the event represented is not one particular event, but one that somehow stands for a series of similar events.
How can a memory be both specific and non-specific at once?
Not a Schema, Not a Particular Event
One tempting thought is that what is being recalled is something like a schema or script: a general pattern or template for ‘what happens at a birthday party’. Sociologists and psychologists have long discussed such mental features. They help us recognize and navigate familiar social situations: arriving, greeting, giving a gift, singing, and so on.
One tempting thought is that what is being recalled is something like a schema or script: a general pattern or template for ‘what happens at a birthday party’. Sociologists and psychologists have long discussed such mental features. They help us recognize and navigate familiar social situations: arriving, greeting, giving a gift, singing, and so on.
But this, I think, does not capture what is going on in generic memories of one’s own past. When I remember Hannah’s annual birthday party, I do not simply recall a generalized birthday-party schema. I remember being in a particular apartment, with specific people, and a familiar atmosphere that had meaning for me. If I remembered only the generic structure of birthday parties, the result would be flat, impersonal, and not tied to my life. This fails to capture what comes to my mind when I remember Hannah’s annual birthday party.
Another possibility would be to think that generic remembering simply involves recalling one particular birthday party and treating it as representative of the whole series. But this does not seem right either. If I were recalling only Hannah’s 2019 party, then my memory would be just an ordinary episodic memory of that particular event. And crucially, what I remember in the generic case does not feel like recalling a single determinate party. Rather, it feels like recalling the birthday parties in general, while nevertheless recalling something with texture and some degree of lived detail.
So neither the representation of a purely abstract schema nor the recall of a specific individual party captures what seems to be going on.
Remembering a Personal Event Prototype
What I suggest is this: in generic memory, we remember a personal event prototype.
An event prototype is not a particular, original event. Nor is it a purely abstract schema. Instead, it is a kind of cluster formed out of our past experiences of similar events. It contains the statistically typical features of the events in the series – but without being tied to any single occurrence.
In remembering Hannah’s annual birthday party, I recall something like: the usual location (though I know there were exceptions); many of the usual guests; the typical atmosphere; the sort of conversations and music that tended to occur.
This prototype representation has enough concreteness to be audio-visualizable, but enough abstraction to cover the variation between different years. When conceived in this way, an adequate description does not have to choose between specificity and non-specificity, as generic memory can encompass both.
The Dynamic Shifting Between Generic and Episodic Memory
One of the most interesting consequences of thinking about generic memory this way is that it sheds light on how we move between different ways of recollection.
If I begin with the prototype recall of Hannah’s annual birthday party, I can zoom into details. I may suddenly remember one particular year in which something dramatic or amusing occurred – the year a surprise guest arrived, or when a heated political debate broke out in the kitchen. My memory becomes episodic, richer in personal detail, anchored to a particular time.
But I can also zoom back out. I can let the details soften again, and the memory returns to representing the general ‘type’ of Hannah’s parties.
This suggests something important: generic and episodic memory are not separate systems, but dynamically interconnected ways of remembering. They are two ways of accessing personal experiences of one’s past.
This shows that we do not simply store individual memories or purely abstract generalizations. We store patterns across personal experience, and we are capable of recalling the pattern or its individual instances, depending on context, purpose, and emotional relevance.
Understanding generic remembering in terms of representing personal past event prototypes allows us to describe memories of recurring events without stretching the notion of episodic memory or reducing such memories to abstract knowledge. It provides a way to account for how these memories can be vivid and imagistic while not referring to one particular moment in the past. And it helps clarify how generic and episodic memories are connected: recalling a personal event prototype can serve as a kind of anchor point from which more specific recollections can be developed when needed, and to which we can return when the details of individual occasions are not relevant.
Recognizing this helps illuminate how remembering actually unfolds in everyday life, where we often shift seamlessly between recalling a pattern of personal experiences and recalling a particular event. And perhaps this has a further implication: because recalling personal event prototypes reflect what tends to persist across time, they may also play a role in how we understand ourselves as having a history with certain ongoing themes or habits. In this sense, generic memory may contribute not only to how we remember our past, but also to how we experience our lives as having a characteristic shape.
