Abstract

We studied the phenomenology of the immediate and delayed memory for a complex event - constructed in laboratory - according to an everyday memory paradigm. We analyzed each event's constituent separately: the setting, the event's plot, the visual images and proper names. Our working hypotheses were: 1. in the memory for an event, information belonging to different knowledge domains are differently coded and retrieved; 2. repetitions affect the memory performance in different ways that depend on the kind of knowledge to be retrieved. Sixty subjects, randomly assigned in two groups (experimental and control group), participated in the experiment: both groups were tested with an immediate and a six-month delayed free recall and with a final recognition task. Only the experimental group was tested with intermediate free recall tasks every two months after the event. Results suggest that: the quantity and quality of the memory for the different components of an event differ as to their depending on the referential specificity of the materials to be remembered and on the interplay with background knowledge; 2. the efficacy of repetitions is domain-specific; 3. the facilitation produced by the recognition task in the recall of the subjects without intermediate repetitions equals that found for the final free recall of the subjects with repetitions.