People’s memories for traumatic experiences supposedly lack “coherence.” Yet scientific evidence does not conclusively support these claims—instead, the evidence is mixed. We hypothesized this mixed evidence occurs because coherence is not a stable property of an individual memory, and is sensitive to momentary attributions depending on how that memory is retrieved. In Experiment 1 we asked 1640 people to bring to mind a memory that was either positive, negative, important, or traumatic, and then to either simply describe that event, or answer many specific questions about it. Those who answered specific questions rated their memories as less coherent than those who provided descriptions. In Experiment 2 with 886 people, these effects persisted regardless of people’s reported PTSD symptoms. Across both experiments, we found no evidence to suggest traumatic memories feel incoherent. Our results suggest coherence is sensitive to momentary attributions, depending on how a memory is retrieved.

人们对创伤经历的记忆可能缺乏“连贯性”。然而，科学证据并不能最终支持这些主张，相反，证据是混杂的。我们假设出现这种混杂的证据是因为连贯性不是单个记忆的稳定属性，并且对瞬时归因敏感，具体取决于检索该记忆的方式。在实验1中，我们要求1640个人记住一个正面的，负面的，重要的或创伤的记忆，然后简单地描述该事件，或回答有关此事件的许多特定问题。回答了特定问题的人认为他们的记忆不如提供描述的人那么连贯。在有886人的实验2中，无论人们报告的PTSD症状如何，这些影响都持续存在。在两个实验中 我们没有发现暗示创伤性记忆不连贯的证据。我们的结果表明，连贯性对瞬时归因敏感，具体取决于如何检索内存。