Stability and change in the organisation of collective memory representations.

In this study, we investigated the impact of a highly consequential public event, the July 15 Coup Attempt, on the structure and organisation of events in Turkish collective memory. To do this, we followed up on our earlier work (Mutlutürk, Tekcan, & Boduroglu, 2021) that used the multidimensional scaling approach to identify critical dimensions in public event representational space. Participants rated the similarity of 15 key public events in a pairwise fashion, across three waves of data collection.

Life-span retrieval of public events: Reminiscence bump for high-impact events, recency for others.

Although substantial evidence exists showing a reliable reminiscence bump for personal events, data regarding retrieval distributions for public events have been equivocal. The primary aim of the present study was to address life-span retrieval distributions of different types of public events in comparison to personal events, and to test whether the existing accounts of the bump can explain the distribution of public events. We asked a large national sample to report the most important, happiest, and saddest personal events and the most important, happiest, saddest, most proud, most fearful, and most shameful public events.

Remembering and telling self-consistent and self-discrepant memories.

It has been argued that memories that are inconsistent with one's self would differ from those that are consistent with the self. The present study addresses retrieval, phenomenology, rehearsal and narrative characteristics of autobiographical memories that are consistent versus discrepant with one's self. One hundred participants were asked to recall one self-consistent and one self-discrepant memory as well as an episode of telling these memories to others.

Effects of spatial configurations on the resolution of spatial working memory.

Recent research demonstrated that people represent spatial information configurally and preservation of configural cues at retrieval helps memory for spatial locations (Boduroğlu & Shah, Memory & Cognition, 37(8), 1120-1131 2009; Jiang, Olson, & Chun, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26(3), 683-702 2000). The present study investigated the effects of spatial configurations on the resolution of individual location representations. In an open-ended task, participants first studied a set of object locations (three and five locations).