Remembering from the Third-Person Perspective?
A few days ago, I heard a National Public Radio interview on the topic of autobiographical memory. One thing the interviewee said stuck in my mind: People who remember past events in the "third person" (i.e., as though viewing themselves from the outside) differ from those who tend to remember past events in the "first person" (i.e., as though looking at it through their own eyes again). Among other things, this researcher claimed that third-person memory was better associated with accepting one's past mistakes and growing in response to them.
Several things in those remarks set off my skeptical alarms, but let me focus on one: Do people really remember events in the third or first person? I have no doubt that if you ask people to say whether a memory was first- or third-person, they'll be kind enough to give you a confident-seeming answer. But do autobiographical memories of particular past episodes have to have a visual perspective of this sort?
Some behaviorally quite normal people claim never to experience visual imagery. Let's suppose they're right about this. Of course they nonetheless have autobiographical episodic memories. How would such memories have a first- or third-person perspective, if there's no visual imagery involved? Would they have a first- or third-person auditory perspective? (Well sure, why not? But is this what the researchers have in mind?)
Maybe memories can be episodic and not visual at all; or visual yet not perspectival. The great writer Jorge Luis Borges and the emiment 19th century psychologist Francis Galton describe cases of visual imagery from visually-impossible circular or all-embracing perspectives or non-perspectives (e.g., the front and back of a coin visualized simultaneously).
In the 1950s people said they dreamed in black and white. Now they say they dream in color. People seem to assimilate their dreams to movies -- so much so that they erroneously attribute incidental features of movies, like black and whiteness (and maybe also like coloration) to their dreams. Similarly, it seems that people in cultural groups that analogize waking visual experience to flat media like pictures and paintings are more likely to attribute some sort of flatness to their visual experience than those who use other sorts of analogies for visual experience.
So I wonder: Do we imagine that we're remembering things "from a third-person perspective" in part because we assimilate autobiographical memory to television and movie narratives? Maybe, because of our immersion in film media, we (now) really do remember our past lives as though we were the protagonist of a movie? Or maybe we don't really tend to do that, but rather report our autobiographical memories as being like that (when pressed by a psychologist or by someone else or even just by ourselves) because the analogy between movies and memorial flashbacks is so tempting?
Would people in cultures without movies have comparably high rates of reporting autobiographical memory as though from a third-person perspective? Probably this has never been studied....