Do memories of fictional events feel different from factual events?

What is it about?

When remembering an event, you experience how clear it seems to you, how much you remember of what you saw, heard or felt during the event, and how emotional it is. Previous research have found a difference in how memories of events described in text differ depending on whether they are real or fictional. For example, you may remember reading in a novel about an event involving an political activist. Would your memory feel different in your remember this event but from a news story? Earlier research have found a difference, so that memory of negative fictional events are remembered more clearly than negative factual events. In this paper, we tried to replicate these findings in two studies. While doing so, we also measured the degree of mental simulation of the events - as we suggested that if any differences exist, they may be explained by increased mental simulation of the events.

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Photo by Charlotte Malene on Unsplash

Photo by Charlotte Malene on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The study sheds light on how memory of events works.