The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique set of circumstances in which to investigate collective memory and future simulations of events reported during the onset of a potentially historic event. Between early April and late June 2020, we asked over 4,000 individuals from 15 countries across four continents to report on remarkable (a) national and (b) global events that (i) had happened since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, and (ii) they expected to happen in the future. Whereas themes of infections, lockdown, and politics dominated global and national past events in most countries, themes of economy, a second wave, and lockdown dominated future events. The themes and phenomenological characteristics of the events differed based on contextual group factors. First, across all conditions, the event themes differed to a small yet significant degree depending on the severity of the pandemic and stringency of governmental response at the national level. Second, participants reported national events as less negative and more vivid than global events, and group differences in emotional valence were largest for future events. This research demonstrates that even during the early stages of the pandemic, themes relating to its onset and course were shared across many countries, thus providing preliminary evidence for the emergence of collective memories of this event as it was occurring. Current findings provide a profile of past and future collective events from the early stages of the ongoing pandemic, and factors accounting for the consistencies and differences in event representations across 15 countries are discussed. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13421-022-01329-8.

We perceive the world in a continuum but remember our past as discrete episodic events. Dominant models of event segmentation suggest that prediction errors or contextual changes are the driving factors that parse continuous experiences into segmented events. These models propose working memory to hold a critical role in event segmentation, yet the particular functioning of working memory that underlies segmented episodic memories remains unclear. Here, we first review the literature regarding the factors that result in the segmentation of episodic memories. Next, we discuss the role of working memory under two possible models regarding how it represents information within each event. Lastly, we summarize the role of the hippocampus in segmenting and integrating events. Clarifying the contributions of working memory to event segmentation is important to improve our understanding of the structure of episodic memories.

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