Personal Memories and Generic Mental Representations

The paper focuses on the particular structure of the content of so-called generic memories, specifically of those of recurring events from one's past. This way of remembering has two central features that are in tension to each other: what is mentally represented is both rather specific as one is typically simulating a scene and sufficiently abstract as the represented scene stands for a series of similar former events. It will be argued that the phenomenon can be adequately described as a mental state representing personal event prototypes. This description further allows to account for the dynamic process of remembering, in which, depending on the context, different forms of personal remembering may come to the fore.