Abstract
This article presents a study aimed at comparing research methodologies in the field of memory studies, in the context of the rediscovery of consciousness and experience in cognitive psychology. Adopting the enaction theory perspective of Francisco Varela, we understand that the experience is not a representation of a pre-given world and also that the subject and the object are co-emergent. The project intended to compare the methodologies in respect of their ability to access the experience. Therefore, we aimed to compare a first-person methodology with a third-person methodology in the study of a phenomenon called “false memory”. As a third-person methodology, we used an experimental protocol based on an experiment on misinformation developed by Belli. As a first-person methodology, we developed an interviewing technique inspired by the Explicitation Interview of Pierre Vermersch called “cartographic interview”. This article presents some of the results of the project, mainly with respect to the access to the remembering experience in the interviews. The third-person methodology has limitations in the access of the experience itself, insofar as it does not refer directly to the experience, but to the “reaction time” and “score of hits” variables in predetermined questions. Consequently, there is a judicative tendency towards the subjective experience. In the interviews, instead, we could observe different movements to embrace co-emergence, to a greater or lesser degree. We defined three categories as indicators of these movements: automatism, egoic control, and collective autonomy, which are described in this article.
Methodology; Interview; Cognition; False Memory; Experience