People not only have vivid memories of their own personal experiences, but also vicarious
memories of events that happened to other people. To compare the phenomenological and
functional qualities of personal and vicarious memories, college students described a specific
past event that they had recounted to a parent or friend, and also an event that a friend
or parent had recounted to them. Although ratings of memory vividness, emotional intensity,
visualization, and physical reactions were higher for personal than for vicarious memories,
the overall pattern of ratings was similar. Participants’ ratings also indicated that
vicarious memories serve many of the same life functions as personal memories, although
at lower levels of intensity. The findings suggest that current conceptions of autobiographical
memory, which focus on past events that happened directly to the self, should be
expanded to include detailed mental representations of specific past events that happened
to other people