The connection between personal semantics and the subjective experience of episodic content: A multilevel analysis

The dichotomy between episodic and semantic memory has historically limited investigations into memory phenomena that exhibit characteristics of both memory types. Notably, personal semantics can demonstrate episodic qualities of personal significance and semantic qualities of spatiotemporal context-independence. The current study examined this intersection of episodic and semantic memory by investigating whether and to what extent the phenomenological experiences of recalling knowledge of personally familiar people and places and recalling a past episode are related. Participants recalled past episodes each comprising two episodic details, a personally familiar person and location, and rated the subjective vividness of each detail. In a separate personal semantics task, participants generated facts for the same person and location details comprising the recalled episodes and rated the amount of facts experienced. A multilevel analysis revealed that the amount of facts during the personal semantics task predicted the corresponding subjective vividness of those same details during recollection. Importantly, this relationship replicated in a second experiment and persisted even after omitting trials for which participants had utilized an episodic strategy during the personal semantics task. These findings indicate that the subjective experience across personal semantic and episodic memories is linked at the level of individual details.