Fig. 5.

Collective and affective memory for top 2020 news events and estimated time between them. We asked a new cohort of participants in 2022 to rate the two top 2020 news topics for each month on memorability and remembered affect (ratings ranged from 0 to 100). (A) Surprise ratings for news events, averaged by month (emergency COVID-19 news included in March), yielding a similar pattern to the distribution of 2020 autobiographical memory. (B) The strength of remembered surprise, negative affect, and positive affect were each independently associated with greater memorability of retrieved news items. (C) Participants also estimated how close or far apart pairs of news events were in time (from 0, very close, to 100, very far); some pairs spanned the predominant lockdown period in the United States (Fig. 1A), and some did not. Controlling for actual distance, we found pairs that spanned the lockdown were judged as closer to each other than pairs that did not (there were no differences between pairs that occurred pre- and postlockdown).