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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., Krystian Barzykowski was supported by the French Government Scholarship (`Campus France'), the National Science Centre, Poland (UMO-2019/35/B/HS6/00528) and the Bekker programme from the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (no.: PPN/BEK/2019/1/00092/DEC/1). The Washington University in St. Louis collaboration (Dessenberger, Roediger, Tekin, and Uner) was supported by a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation to HLR. A. Taylor gratefully acknowledges support from The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.

Prior research suggests that second language (L2) vocabulary learning often occurs through lexical inferencing (translations based on context), but there has been less emphasis on how lexical inferencing compares with other methods of L2 word learning. The present study compared lexical inferencing to simply studying word lists for L2 learning. A secondary goal was to determine whether any effect of inferencing is mediated by the generation effect of memory, a phenomenon wherein generated information (inferencing) is remembered better than obtained information (reading). Across four experiments, participants read English sentences with embedded Swahili words and were asked either to infer the word meaning using context or were provided with translations before reading the sentence (reading condition). In contrast to our initial hypotheses, the inference condition resulted in lower rates of retention compared with the reading condition. In addition, the data suggest a number of differences between lexical inferencing and the generation effect, that argue against the proposal that lexical inferencing operates as a type of generation effect.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique set of circumstances 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 4000 individuals from 15 countries across four continents to report on remarkable (a) national and (b) global events that (i) have happened since the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, and (ii) they expect 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 its onset and course were shared across many countries, thus, providing preliminary evidence for the emergence of collective memories of this event as it is 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.