Remembering, Knowing, and Reconstructing the Past

This chapter is concerned with the processes of remembering, knowing, and reconstructing past events. Memory refers to all these processes, and others, but different bases and mental states in the knowledge of the past can be separated. Remembering, as used here, refers to the recollection of past events when details of these events can be retrieved; the events can be mentally re-experienced. Subjects claim to have such remembering experiences more frequently after deep as opposed to shallow levels of processing of material, after generating rather than reading words, and following the study of pictures rather than words. Subjects can know that events happened in their past without being able to remember them. It discusses that in forced recall, subjects try to remember the events as well as possible, but then must also confabulate responses. The interest centers on subjects' tendencies to recognize their confabulated responses as actual memories. Confidence ratings are used to estimate their subjective experience of remembering, but it would be interesting to ask subjects on a delayed forced-recall test to provide remember and know responses for the information they claim to recognize as having occurred.