Exactly three years ago today Denise was eating lunch with two friends at a restaurant when a very confused man came into the restaurant and began firing a gun at the pictures hanging on the walls. Denise remembers many details of that day, including the clothes she was wearing and what she ate for lunch. Denise has such clear memories of that day partly because those memories are characterized by a high degree of:

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The fact that Denise remembers many details of the event suggests that her memories are distinctive, meaning they stand out from other memories and are easily retrievable. This is likely due to the unusual and traumatic nature of the event. Mood congruence involves the tendency to remember events that match our current mood, semantic information refers to general knowledge and facts, and state-dependent retrieval involves better recall when our internal state (such as being intoxicated) at the time of encoding matches our internal state during retrieval.

Exactly Three Years Ago Today Denise Was Eating Lunch with Two