Kurbat M A, Shevell S K, Rips L J
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.
Mem Cognit. 1998 May;26(3):532-52. doi: 10.3758/bf03201161.
When asked to recall autobiographical events from the past year, students tend to recall more incidents from the beginning and the end of school terms than from other periods. We investigated this calendar effect in Experiment 1 by comparing free recall at schools with different academic calendars. The event distributions tracked the individual calendars, helping to eliminate the possibility that the calendar effect is due to seasonal, nonschool factors, such as holidays. In Experiments 2-4, we checked explanations based on the ideas that events at term boundaries are more important or distinctive than others, that events are incorrectly dated too near the boundaries, and that boundaries serve as implicit cues for recall. These experiments revealed no evidence that importance or errors in dating could explain the effect. Manipulating cues, however, did change the size of the effect, implicating retrieval from very long-term memory as the effect's source. We suggest that when people have to search episodic memory, they consider their own calendar rhythms (such as a student's academic schedule) and let the temporal structure of their personal context guide their search.
当被要求回忆过去一年的自传式事件时，学生们倾向于回忆起学期开始和结束时的更多事件，而不是其他时间段的。在实验1中，我们通过比较不同学术日历的学校中的自由回忆，来研究这种日历效应。事件分布跟踪了个人日历，有助于排除日历效应是由季节性的、非学校因素（如节假日）导致的可能性。在实验2至4中，我们检验了基于以下观点的解释：学期边界处的事件比其他事件更重要或更独特；事件被错误地标注在离边界太近的时间；边界作为回忆的隐性线索。这些实验没有发现重要性或日期错误可以解释这种效应的证据。然而，操纵线索确实改变了效应的大小，这表明从非常长期的记忆中检索是效应的来源。我们认为，当人们必须搜索情景记忆时，他们会考虑自己的日历节奏（如学生的学术日程），并让个人背景的时间结构指导他们的搜索。
