The Study
This research study represents the third in a series of four case studies investigating the nature and character of visitors’ long-term memories of experiences at World Expositions. The outcomes of these studies are providing new insights about visitors’ long-term memories for the contemplation of developers of exposition experiences, large and small. The first two studies examined visitors’ long-term memories associated with two contemporary expositions—Expo 86 (Vancouver, Canada) and Expo 88 (Brisbane, Australia); these were jointly reported in Curator: The Museum Journal (Anderson 2003). A quantitative analysis of the Expo 70 study was reported in Memory (Anderson and Shimizu 2007). The final case in the series considered Expo 67 (Montreal, Canada) and was undertaken in the winter of 2007.
I
n the study of the contemporary expositions (Anderson 2003), the long-term memories of a total of 50 visitors who attended either Expo 86 or Expo 88 were probed through in-depth, face-to-face interviews. The outcomes reported represent themes common to visitors’ memories of two different expositions held in two different countries, yet the emergent themes regarding memories of these kinds of events were strongly confirmatory of each other. In particular, the study demonstrated that visitors’ social memories of the experience were highly salient, their socio-cultural identities at the time of the experience critically shaped their memories of the experience, and the agendas that visitors recalled at the time of the experience influenced the vividness of memory. However, several questions remain unanswered from the contemporary expositions study: for example, how is ��������������������������������������������������������������retention of vivid long-term memories influenced by the agendas visitors brought with them at the time of the experience?
Are there other factors not evidenced in the contemporary expositions study that provide insights about the kind of experiences, exhibitions, or visitor psychologies that make for qualitatively rich, vivid long-term memories? The Expo 70 study aimed to further investigate, verify, and elucidate the nature of visitors’ long-term memories associated with their personal experience of their visits to World Expositions—visits that remain vivid years later. In particular, the study sought better understanding of how visitors developed�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d�d� and maintained vivid long-term memories of their experiences using the case of a more chronologically distant exposition.
The study was in part phenomenographic in nature, in that it sought to interpret the phenomenon of the nature and character of visitors’ long-term memories of World Expos (Holstwin and Gubrium 1998), while its theoretical location resides with the examination of episodic and/or autobiographical aspects of recall (Conway 2001; Squire 1992; Squire, Knowlton and Musen 1993; Tulving 1983; Tulving and Donaldson 1972). The study was not concerned about the accuracy of self-reported experience. Rather, the focus was on why the memory is vivid today (34 years later). Since reliability of memory was not the concern, the study looked at the qualitatively rich memories participants described during the study. These rich memories are considered people’s “current reality” (or “subjective reality”) of the recalled events, and they may or may not perfectly represent the original reality as constructed in 1970.