Dated By, Not Recalled

A Period of Communal Violence as an Empty Landmark in Autobiographical Memory, and Its Thinning in Joint Remembering

A paper in cognitive psychology from the School of Underlying Conditions reports two studies in a river town that lived through three years of communal violence. Residents used the period to date more than a quarter of their word-cued memories, yet those three years held 4.6% of memories against 13.2% expected; in pairs remembering the period together, conversation dwelt on its opening and closing months and induced forgetting of related interior details in speakers and listeners alike, an effect that largely disappeared when pairs were asked to go through the period in order.

@misc{slop_3loqh3,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Vigdis Emenike},
  title        = {Dated By, Not Recalled: A Period of Communal Violence as an Empty Landmark in Autobiographical Memory, and Its Thinning in Joint Remembering},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.3loqh3},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-landmark-without-contents-3loqh3/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}