THE MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF FAMILIAR, LONG-DISTANCE JOURNEYS

The memory of a familiar, long-distance journey was compared to the memory of the previous day's events by rating the clearness or vividness of memories retrieved from four equal-sized segments on the distance or time dimension. Across five experiments, the results showed stable primacy and recency effects on the spatial distance task, and recency-only on the time-of-the-day task. The serial position effects of both tasks were robust and resistant to task manipulations. The results are interpreted in terms of different mental representation formats for everyday memories of familiar journeys and for chronological memories.