In this podcast episode, Jonathan Caballero interviews Oliver Bontkes and Dr. Eva Rubínová about their recent paper published in Memory and Cognition about repeated‑event memories and how their position on the semantic–episodic continuum can differ. 

Transcript

Kosovicheva: 

You are listening to all Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast. 

Caballero: 

I’m Jonathan Caballero, and I will be your host today. 

The structure of our everyday lives is formed by repeated events. For example, the day-to-day structure at work school, and many recreational activities. And many of the meaningful memories we have of those contexts are based on repeated events, but it turns out that we don’t know a lot about how we remember them. The study we cover today explores the diverse ways in which repeated events are recalled. For this, I’m having a conversation with Oliver Bontkes and Dr. Eva Rubínová [authors pictured below], thanks for joining us today. 

Bontkes: 

Thank you so much for having us <laugh>. 

Rubínová: 

Thank you for having us. 

Caballero: 

I would like to invite you to introduce yourselves and the title of your recent paper, published in Memory and Cognition, a Journal of the Psychonomic Society. 

Bontkes: 

Yeah, my name’s Oliver Bontkes. I’m a grad student in clinical psychology at the University of British Columbia. Eva, do you wanna introduce yourself? 

Rubínová: 

Yeah, sure. My name is Eva Rubínová. I’m a lecturer, which is sort of equivalent to associate professor at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland in the UK. 

Bontkes: 

And today, I guess we’re talking about our paper that we recently published in Memory and Cognition which is “Similarity is associated with where repeated‑event memories fall on the semantic–episodic continuum”. 

Caballero: 

Thank you so much. Could you tell us a bit about the background of the research and why did you decide to conduct it? 

Rubínová: 

Sure. I guess I’ll start, and I will start with a little bit of a background to the repeated events area to the research that is typically published or that is out there in the field. So, the repeated event research out there is typically very applied. So it is a… it is sort of focused on the important questions and applications in the criminal justice system, where we really want to sort of emphasize that remembering an instance that is a single episode out of a sequence of similar events that we call repeated events is quite different from remembering a single episode or a unique experience. And this is particularly relevant in cases of repeated offending. So, there’s been several decades of research with child samples, and recently, in the past decade, there’s been an upcoming wave of research with adults. 

And what we typically find there is that participants are much less able to recall details of instances of repeated events compared to single events. And they’re also much less accurate in their recall of repeated events. So, what is typically emphasized in this research is the script-like nature of repeated event memories. So, scripts are sort of these generalizations or amalgamations of these repeated experiences. So, what people typically remember very well and with high confidence is what usually happens. So those are the repeated aspects of these experiences. What people are much less able to either recall, or recall accurately, are those details of specific instances. So, the implication of the applied research is really for the criminal justice system to understand how to best define charges in cases of repeated offenses and also how repetition may impact credibility. Basically, what could be expected from people when they are asked to report on repeated experiences.  

In this paper, we wanted to take a different perspective; a bit more of a theoretical perspective because from, from the adult research and also from some of the child research, we do know that individuals are able to report accurately instances of some repeated events. And there’s a huge variety of repeated events that people experience in our daily lives. Much of the applied research is empirical. So, those are repeated events that are created in the lab. So, in the current study, we really wanted to explore the variability that comes with repeated events that people experience in their own lives. And Oliver also brought this theoretical perspective that is traditionally used in autobiographical memory literature into this repeated event research. So, he will tell you more about that. 

Bontkes: 

Yeah. So, as Eva mentioned, like, in this paper we kind of came out with a bit of a spin on the whole repeated event literature. So, as Eva mentioned a lot of the emphasis is on things like scripts which would be called sometimes “semantic memory structure”. But me and the other author on this paper, Dr. Daniela Palombo, who’s at the University of British Columbia as well. We, our background is more in the autobiographical memory literature and, in the autobiographical memory literature, there is a focus on both semantic and, in particular episodic, memory. So, I’ll just give a brief, sort of, definition of both, just so that everyone is on the same page. 

So, semantic memory is thought to be, like these, generalized, like, factual information. Just general knowledge. So, a common example is just knowing that the capital of France is Paris. That’s just a factual thing. You don’t necessarily know when you learned it or how you know it, you just sort of know it. That that’s what we think of as semantic memory. Episodic memory, on the other hand, is memory of distinct events, localized in time and place. So, what we think of as these, when we recollect on our lives, these isolated kind of experiences that we can think back to and have this progression in time. So, to give an example, maybe from my own life; I went to a big soccer game a couple months ago with some family members. And it’s an experience I remember kind of the full day of, almost. So that would be an episodic memory. And I think some people find it helpful to associate episodic memory with almost like a TV episode. Like one of those, a little snippet like that. 

So yeah, semantic and episodic memory are emphasized in the autobiographical memory literature. But less so in the repeated event memory literature. And there’s this recent theory that has started coming up in the autobiographical memory literature which is called “the continuum theory”, or we’ve been referring to it as “the continuum theory”, which is basically the idea that there is this, you know, continuum or spectrum of memory from semantic memory on the one side – these generalized abstract information – to episodic memory on the other side – which is, again, like these distinct events, localized and time and place. And so the thought is that in addition to these two kind of pure extremes, there’s a bunch of intermediate forms of memory that fall at different points along this continuum. And repeated events have sort of thought to be one of those forms of memory that is intermediate on the semantic episodic continuum. 

So essentially what that means is that they draw on both semantic memory and episodic memory without necessarily falling well into either category. So that theory, though has been like kind of developed, it’s never really been tested out in sort of an empirical study on repeated events before the paper that we did, or at least to our knowledge. So that was the perspective that myself and my supervisor, Dr. Daniela Palombo brought to the paper. And we think it mixes well with Dr. Rubínová’s expertise in more of the actual repeated event memory literature. And so, in kind of coming together with that, we, as Eva mentioned, we wanted to look at more naturalistic repeated events. Repeated events from people’s own lives and sort of just see generally where are these repeated events falling on the semantic episodic continuum? Do they vary in where they fall? And, in particular, are there any factors which might be associated with where repeated events fall on the semantic episodic continuum? 

And in our preregistration, we came up with this idea that similarity might be associated with where repeated events fall on the semantic-episodic continuum. And that was partially based on some literature from the previous repeated event literature where they found that similarity was associated with how children remember repeated events. And so, we essentially predicted that semantic memory – again, this factual kind of abstract knowledge-based memory – would be positively correlated with similarity. So, in other words, as repeated events get more similar, in the sense that each instance of the repeated event is similar to all the other instances that would lead people to rely more on semantic memory, whereas less similar repeated events would rely more on episodic memory. So that, those were the two main predictions we made at the beginning of the study. 

Caballero: 

Thank you. It’s so fascinating to see… this area of research, and I also find particularly interesting how well it maps to the type of experiences that we have when we recall. So, I really enjoyed that. And it seems like you had a very interesting crossing of expertise and a combination of perspectives. So, I’m really enjoying it. 

Uhm, could you share with us what participants did in your experiments? 

Bontkes: 

Yeah, for sure. So, we did a two samples, so kind of two studies, but people followed identical paradigms in both. And what we basically asked people to do is come up with three repeated event memories from their own lives. I figured for the purposes of this podcast; it might be helpful to give an example. So, one example of a repeat event I like to give is just soccer practice. Something that for me has been very prevalent growing up. So, we basically asked people to come up with three repeated events from their own lives. So again, soccer practice, and then report on different aspects of their memory. So, first we ask people about phenomenological ratings. So, things like how vivid is your memory, how much visual detail comes up for you when you’re remembering the event? How emotional is it? Is it positive, is it negative, neutral? And then we asked people to report on the similarity amongst instances of the repeated events. So, for example, how similar is soccer practice? And for me that would be pretty similar, like, most soccer practices, they follow a general progression of like warmup to, you do some drills, and then you might have, like a, scrimmage at the end, for example. So, for me, I’d rated it as fairly similar. And then after that, they provided a narrative which we, did some analyses on, but we’re mostly going to analyze the narratives in a follow-up study. And then, after that, they reported on the degree to which they relied on semantic memory, which we called “acquired knowledge and expectations”, just to kind of simplify it for participants. And then episodic memory, which we operationalize as like a single instance of a repeated event. So how much, for example, my memory relies on a single instance of soccer practice. So, one particular time that I did soccer practice. 

And then we also asked a third reliance question, which was “how much are you relying on a mixture of episodes?” So, this was more of an exploratory thing we threw in there just ’cause we figured it’s probably not the case that people are only, you know, having this factual information and like a single instance, it’s more likely that people have multiple instances that come to mind in some fashion or another. So, we just kind of threw that in there, but we didn’t have any predictions about how that would relate to similarity at the outset. And so, they followed that progression of questions for all three repeated events they came up with. So, every part, just again, three memories, and report on all of them. 

Caballero: 

It seems like a very interesting experiment to take part in! So, if I followed it correctly, if I was a participant, I will basically be sharing or recalling part of my own memories, but in the background, you will be really being able to have a fine-grained understanding of how those can be analyzed in terms of the underlying concepts. Is that correct? 

Bontkes: 

Yeah. So, I think participants found it very interesting to participate. So, we got a lot of feedback on people who, you know, ’cause it’s, you don’t always reflect on your memory of repeated events, especially in this manner that we were asking them to do, where we’re asking like, how visually detailed, that’s not like a question you’re normally getting asked. So, I think a lot of people found it quite interesting to reflect on these kind of everyday life memories that they have, and kind of get some understanding of how they’re remembering these repeated events. 

Rubínová: 

I would just like to add that I think that you captured what is really interesting about the data that we collected, Jonathan, in terms of, we collected very rich ratings from participants regarding their own memories, which is the variability we wanted to get in this observational study. Because in experimental studies you just create this one type of event and a lot of participants are, you know, taking part in that event. It can be a video that they view, or it can be a magical show that they participate in, or another type of event. But here we really worked with the variability that participants came up with, plus the ratings. And I guess, what Oliver sort of mentioned, is that we collected those narratives that we didn’t really analyze for this particular study. And that is a ton of data that we have for future follow-up studies.  

Caballero: 

Well, that is exciting already. For the purpose of the current study. Could you share with us what you did find when analyzing all the different aspects of memory recall that you collected? 

Rubínová: 

Yeah. I will just start linking the main findings that we pre-registered, which were related to the question of how similarity relates to either relying on semantic memory or relying on episodic memory when participants were retrieving those repeated event memories. And we found support across both studies for the semantic hypothesis. So, participants who reported that the repeated event memories that they experience are highly similar, also more frequently reported relying on semantic memory or the acquired knowledge across those repeated experiences. And in the second study, which had a higher sample size than the first study, we also found support for the episodic hypothesis. So, the events where participants reported that similarity was not very high more frequently reported relying on their memory of a single episode, which was our operationalization of episodic memory. 

And I think that these results are really cool because, you know, they confirmed our hypothesis, but I think that what was really interesting was a suggestion that Oliver came up with which was related to a profile analysis. So, a profile analysis is not frequently done in repeated event research or in autobiographical memory research because I think researchers frequently don’t have sufficient sample sizes. And as we said, we worked with hundreds and hundreds of participants who each recalled three memories. So, Oliver will tell you more about the profile analysis and what we found there. 

Bontkes: 

Yeah, no, I was very excited to, to kind of have the opportunity to do a bit of exploratory stuff using this profile analysis thing. So, I’ll just explain a bit about what profile analysis is. Because I’m not sure if… I’m assuming everyone listening would not necessarily be familiar with it. So, profile analysis is a bit different from more traditional forms of analysis and a lot of psychological research. So, a lot of psychological research is using what would be called a variable-centered approach where you’re often just trying to find kind of associations, usually linear associations, between variables. So, for example, our main hypotheses for this study would fall along that paradigm of just trying to find linear correlations between, you know, for example, semantic memory and repeated event similarity. 

Profile analysis is a bit different. It’s what’s called, you know, they, they usually call it like a person-centered approach. In this case it was like a memory-centered approach where instead of looking at these linear correlations, you’re trying to find different sort of profiles or patterns of kind of scores across a set of variables. So, in our case, we use our three memory reliance variables, which I’ll just remind everyone is semantic reliance, single-episode reliance, and then this mixed-episode reliance, which we added in as this exploratory thing. And so, we did this profile analysis trying to see if different memories had different patterns of scores across those three variables. And our results revealed some really interesting things which replicated across both studies, which was essentially that we found three types of repeated event memory. 

The first type we called low episodic reliance. And the reason we called it that was because it was distinctively low on this single-episode reliance variable. So, people reported higher scores on semantic reliance and a mixture of episodes, but very low scores on single-episode reliance. And the interesting thing we found in our follow-up analysis that, again, replicated across both studies was that that particular profile was higher in ratings of similarity of place than the other two profiles. So, in other words, as people kind of reported their repeated event occurring in the same place more often they’re more likely, for their memory of that event, to fall into this low episodic reliance profile. 

The second interesting finding that came out of this was this profile we observed in, again, in both studies, which we called the high overall reliance profile, which was high on all three of the reliance variables. And this, again in both studies, was associated with emotional arousal. So, in other words, kind of the emotional intensity of the event seemed to relate to just higher ratings on all three of these variables, which again, we thought was quite interesting. 

And then this third repeated event type that we captured through this profile analysis was the low-overall reliance profile, which sort of had lower to medium scores on all three reliance variables. And we didn’t find anything that replicated across both studies that was kind of unique to this profile. But, you know, in comparison to the other profiles, obviously it was lower in similarity of place than the low episodic reliance profile and lower in arousal than the high-overall reliance profile. So that was another really cool finding that was more exploratory that came out of this study. And yeah, I thought it was very exciting to be able to do this type of analysis on our data. 

Caballero: 

It seems so interesting to think about how, when, let’s say I remember some sort of repeated event memory. There’s so many variables that I’m not even aware, like, probably my own memories maybe depended on where they happened, how my emotions were at that time. Sometimes maybe they were based on lots of single episodes, but sometimes they, actually, maybe were kind of an amalgamation of different things. And I honestly have never reflected on that. So, I find this extremely fascinating. 

Bontkes: 

Absolutely. Yeah. 

Caballero: 

What does this tell us about the way that we remember repeated events? 

Bontkes: 

Yes. So, for this, kind of the main findings we had, the semantic hypothesis and the episodic hypothesis, which as Eva mentioned, we found support in both studies for the semantic hypothesis that similarity is associated with higher use of semantic memory. And then we found some support for the episodic hypothesis, which is that similarity is negatively correlated with the use of a reliance on a single episode in memory. But I think one thing that’s important to highlight is that these findings are correlational. So, we haven’t necessarily established that similarity is causing these memory differences. It’s more just that, it could be that, the fact that you are using semantic memory to remember a repeated event is getting you to rate the event as being more similar. But despite the fact that it’s just sort of correlational, I think the association itself is quite interesting to observe. Just this general idea that similarity, as it increases, there is this simultaneous increase in your use of semantic memory or these, as we’ve discussed several times, like this more abstract kind of script-like memory of the repeated event. And then, I think Eva, yeah… 

Rubínová: 

Yeah, I think that our findings really provide a useful framework for other repeated event researchers because what we really found was support for this idea of continuum between episodic and semantic memory. We found that, you know, some participants made a lot of use of semantic memory. Some participants made a lot of use of episodic memory when they retrieved those repeated events. So, it really looks like there is nuance in the repeated events that people are reporting which can, you know, that is informative also for the criminal justice system or other applied areas where repeated event memories may be of interest. And I think that it is really a strong message for other repeated event researchers who, you know, have for many for a long time emphasized the really scripted or script-like nature of repeated event memories to also note that, you know, some repeated event memories may be retrieved very episodically. So perhaps participants are relying on a memory of a single episode when they are remembering a repeated event. 

Bontkes: 

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I think that the exciting thing about this continuum theory is that it kind of brings in this perspective from phenomenology and just bringing in this idea of how the event appears in the mind’s eye as we recollect it. But even beyond research, I think what’s really exciting to me about repeated event memory research in general is, again, this applied aspect to it. Both in domains, like legal domains, and as I might talk about a bit later, clinical domains, in terms of where we want to go with this in the future, but just generally it’s relevant to everyone’s lives because we all structure our lives around repeated events, you know. As you mentioned at the beginning of this, things like work, going to school, a lot of our recreational activities, they’re all repeated events. And so, our study has… just relevance for anyone who’s structuring their lives with repeated events and has an interest in remembering their life down the road. Because, as our findings indicate, the similarity with which you kind of construct the repeated events of your everyday life is associated with how you remember those repeated events later on. And so I think it’s worth everyone to just kind of reflect on that and think about, you know, how am I structuring my own life? And, how is that gonna be related to what I remember down the road about my life? 

Caballero: 

I love how this seems to be very relatable as a human, as an individual, just interested in memory, but also as someone who might be in an applied context. So, I really appreciate that.  

If I may ask, what are the next steps in this research? Are you planning any follow-up studies on the topic? 

Rubínová: 

Yeah, there’s a lot of directions that this research could go. It tells us something about, you know, how frequency may impact how we remember repeated events. Again, in the applied literature, we typically study repeated events that are between three and six repetitions, not very much beyond, whereas in the everyday life, those repeated events are much more frequent. But we have sort of three more concrete steps that we decided to talk about. So, Oliver will introduce a study that he’s currently writing up. First. 

Bontkes: 

Yeah, so, we have a follow up study that is definitely a deliberate follow-up to the study we’re talking about now. We’re calling it the continuum study, where we’re more directly examining how memories of repeated events compared to both memories of unique events, so things that would be more traditionally thought of as more purely episodic forms of memory, and how those also compared to single instances of repeated events. And we’re trying to see whether those three types of memory fall along a predictable continuum where repeated events are kind of the most semantic, least episodic. And then single instances of repeated events would be a little less semantic, a little bit more episodic. And then unique events would be more episodic and less semantic. So that’s our current kind of paper that we’re working on right now. Hopefully we get it out in relatively promptly, but <laugh>, we’ll see how it goes. 

Rubínová: 

Yeah. I will mention the next one where we are very much in the conceptual stage. We still have to think a lot about what it means, but really the question of what does it mean when participants report that they are relying on a mix of episodes. So, we know from the experimental work that participants frequently struggle with attributing details accurately. So, sort of remembering what happened at which instance, and they make errors along those lines. So, is this the process that participants are sort of remembering a bag of details and then they are using that bag of details to inform their memory when asked to recall a repeated event? Or is that something else? So, we think that this question is really interesting and certainly needs more exploration. And I think this is also something novel that has not been, sort of, worked on that much in the applied literature so far. 

Bontkes: 

Yeah. And another direction I’m also really excited about is putting a more clinical spin on this domain of research, and just looking at how, from a more clinical perspective – ’cause I’m going to grad school for clinical psychology – just how are repeated events relevant for our mental wellbeing, or just general wellbeing, even, just, you know, for example, like dietary habits, exercise habits, those are related to your repeated event memories. So, I’m really interested in things like emotional repeated events, both positive and negative, and how those have bearing on our feelings of wellbeing. But I really think there’s just so many questions in this repeated event domain that are exciting and interesting to pursue. And <laugh>, I wish I had more time because there’s so many different things I wish I could do in this area, but yeah, it’s a very exciting literature to be in. 

Caballero: 

Definitely looking forward to know more about your next studies. 

To finalize. I would like to ask, is there anything else that you would like to share with us that you haven’t had the chance to share so far? 

Rubínová: 

Yeah. I think that I would like to just emphasize that Oliver has been an undergraduate student throughout this whole process, and he approached Daniela and myself, because I used to be a postdoc in Canada, so we met at a conference. And yeah, it was a really fruitful collaboration that has been ongoing since then and it’s been really exciting to work with both Daniela and Oliver. 

Bontkes: 

Yeah, I a hundred percent agree with that. It’s been a really enjoyable time being, you know, supervised and mentored, and collaborating with both Eva and Daniela. And I’m excited for all the things we have planned for the future. But yeah, thank you for having us again. 

Caballero: 

Well, once again, thanks for being here today and thank you so much for sharing all these details about your studies. I’m really looking forward to know what’s coming next! 

Kosovicheva: 

Thank you for listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast. If you liked this episode, please consider following the podcast and leaving us a review. Reviews help us grow our audience so that we can reach more people with the latest research about cognition and the psychological sciences. By the way, we run a blog, too. You can find it online at featuredcontent.psychonomic.org. New articles are published regularly covering the latest research from all seven of our scientific journals. We’ll catch you next time on All Things Cognition. 

Psychonomic Society’s article featured in this post

Bontkes, O.R., Palombo, D.J. & Rubínová, E. (2025). Similarity is associated with where repeated‑event memories fall on the semantic–episodic continuum. Memory & Cognition https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-025-01729-6