Reported events are distinguished from personally experienced (autobiographical) events by being known from reports provided from some person or agency-for example, news reports. Memory for reported events has usually been ignored theoretically, or classified as 'semantic', though it is clearly concerned with specific, dated episodes. We discuss a number of differences between the information available to specify experienced and reported events, and the possible implications of such differences for remembering the events. A study of retrieval of the two types of events, prompted by cue words, showed that reported events take much longer time to retrieve but are dated as being equally old as experienced events. Effects of using emotion words as cues were similar for the two event types. These results suggest that reported events are forgotten (or become inaccessible) at the same rate as experienced events, but that memories are organized in such a way that reported events often have to be accessed indirectly through memories of associated autobiographical events.
People have two different avenues to knowledge about real events in the world around them, their own personal experience and reports they receive from somebody else. We shall call events known in these two ways experienced and reported events, respectively (see Larsen 1983a, in press). Information about both kinds of events may be remembered, of course, but not necessarily in the same way and equally well. It may be expected that different types and amounts of information are available about experienced and reported events and, moreover, that the memories are differently organized and interrelated. The present experiment examines the accessibility of memories of experienced and reported events when retrieval cues are either emotional or non-emotional words.