Martin A Conway

Martin A Conway
City, University of London · Department of Psychology

BSc, Ph.D.

About

243
Publications
136,354
Reads
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21,111
Citations
Introduction
Martin A Conway currently works at the Department of Psychology, City, University of London. Martin does research in Cognitive Psychology, Applied Psychology and NeuroPsychology. Current project is on Memory and the Law.
Additional affiliations
April 2012 - August 2018
City, University of London
Position
  • Head of Department
July 2001 - July 2004
Durham University
Position
  • Head of Department

Publications

Publications (243)
Article
Full-text available
A persistent finding in the autobiographical memory (AM) literature is that older adults report more nonepisodic (or generalized/semantic) information than young adults. Since studies are usually focused on memory for episodic (or specific) autobiographical events, the reason for the age difference in nonepisodic AM remains understudied. This exper...
Preprint
Full-text available
A persistent finding in the autobiographical memory (AM) literature is that older adults report more non-episodic (or generalised/semantic) information than young adults. Since studies are usually focused on memory for episodic (or specific) autobiographical events, the reason for the increase in non-episodic AM remains under-studied. This experime...
Article
In this short article, we provide a brief introduction to the idea that memory involves constructive processes. The importance of constructive processes in memory has a rich history, one that stretches back more than 125 years. This historical context provides a backdrop for the articles appearing in this special issue of Memory, articles that outl...
Article
Full-text available
Studies examining age effects in autobiographical memory have produced inconsistent results. This study examined whether a set of typical autobiographical memory measures produced equivalent results in a single participant sample. Five memory tests (everyday memory, autobiographical memory from the past year, autobiographical memory from age 11–17,...
Article
This paper reviewed articles on autobiographical memories of veterans who fought several major battles around the world. A total of 28 articles, reporting 11 quantitative, 16 qualitative, and 1 mixed-methods study, were identified through a search conducted in 11 major databases. Convergent thematic analysis of the findings extracted five recurrent...
Article
Full-text available
Wearable camera photo review has successfully been used to enhance memory, yet very little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Here, the sequential presentation of wearable camera photos – a key feature of wearable camera photo review – is examined using behavioural and EEG measures. Twelve female participants were taken on a walking tour, st...
Article
Full-text available
Over the last century, humans have radically transformed airspace: chemically, territorially, militarily and psychologically. Technological developments mean that this transformation is accelerating and growing in complexity. There is widening disparity in the global landscape of power, with civilians increasingly subject to expanding commercial an...
Article
Full-text available
This study is the first to demonstrate that a self-defining period (SP) for personally relevant music emerges spontaneously in a public naturalistic setting. While previous research has demonstrated that people tend to have better memory and preference for songs from their teenage years, the theoretical relevance of these studies has been limited b...
Article
Full-text available
Since Brown and Kulik's (1977) seminal work, a central issue in memory literature is whether flashbulb memories (FBMs) hold a special status within autobiographical recalls. To address this issue, we refer back to Brown and Kulik's definition of FBM as a snapshot of the reception context of an important public news and propose a method to identify...
Article
Background: Wearable camera photographs have been shown to be an effective memory aid in people with and without memory impairment. Most studies using wearable cameras as a memory aid have presented photographs on a computer monitor and used a written diary or no review as a comparison. In this pioneering study, we took a new and innovative approa...
Article
Objective: Prior work examining the role of cultural self-goals on the retrieval of early memories treated the presence of self-goals; such as autonomy or relatedness, as a binary category which has led to overlooking within-group nuances. Here, based on the idea that these goals co-exist in varying degrees in individuals, we explore the relative...
Chapter
The self-memory system model of autobiographical memory has been highly influential in providing a framework in which to locate a wide range of research findings from neuropsychology, psychological illness, behavioral findings, to attachment and personality research. Here the authors update the model and clarify some common misunderstandings. They...
Article
Past research has demonstrated a relationship between déjà vu and the entorhinal cortex in patients with wider medial temporal lobe damage. The aim of the present research was to investigate this crucial link in a patient (MR) with a selective lesion to the left lateral entorhinal cortex to provide a more direct exploration of this relationship. Tw...
Preprint
Full-text available
Studies examining age effects in autobiographical memory have produced inconsistent results. This study examined whether a set of typical autobiographical memory measures produced equivalent results in a single participant sample. Five memory tests (everyday memory, autobiographical memory from the past year, autobiographical memory from age 11-17,...
Article
Memory experts, the police, and the public, completed a memory questionnaire containing a series of statements about autobiographical memory. The statements covered issues such as the nature of memory, determinants of accuracy, the relation of emotion and trauma to memory, and respondents indicated their agreement/disagreement with each of the stat...
Poster
In the US, more than 70% of men and women were wrongfully convicted largely due to inaccurate eyewitness identification. At present, both eyewitness and earwitness testimony are permitted in court trials. Earwitness memory is the recall and recognition of auditory information by witnesses (Heath & Moore, 2011). Earwitness lineups occur when an indi...
Article
Full-text available
In a large-scale survey 6641 respondents provided descriptions of their first memory, age-at-encoding (AaE), and completed various memory judgments and ratings. In good agreement with many other studies, where mean AaE of earliest memories is usually found to fall somewhere in the first half of the third year of life, the mean AaE here was 3.2 year...
Article
Full-text available
Two experiments measured the effect of retrieval support provided by a wearable camera, SenseCam, on older and younger adults’ memory for a recently experienced complex staged event. In each experiment participants completed a series of tasks in groups and the events were recalled two weeks later, after viewing SenseCam images (experimental conditi...
Article
Full-text available
Positivity biases in autobiographical memory and episodic future thinking are considered important in mental wellbeing and are reduced in anxiety and depression. The inhibitory processes underlying retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) have been proposed to contribute to these biases. This investigation found reduced positivity in past and future thin...
Article
Full-text available
The perspective in which memories were spontaneously recalled, field (original perspective) or observer (see oneself in the memory), was examined for both recent and remote memories. Recent memories were dominated by field perspective whilst remote memories were dominated by observer perspective. Further, field memories contained reliably more epis...
Book
Memory is often the primary evidence in the courtroom, yet unfortunately this evidence may not be fit for purpose. This is because memory is both fallible and malleable; it is possible to forget and also to falsely remember things which never happened. The legal system has been slow to adapt to scientific findings about memory even though such find...
Article
Background and objectives: Stimuli associated with the trauma are important triggers for intrusive memories after a traumatic event. Clinical models assume that fear conditioning for neutral stimuli encountered during traumatic events is a potential cause of these intrusions, and that memory integration has the effect of reducing these association...
Article
Full-text available
This study measured the effect of a wearable camera, SenseCam, on older and younger adults’ memories of recently experienced everyday events. Participants used SenseCam to prospectively sample events from a typical week, which they recalled two weeks later. Recall was cued by a self-generated title only (control condition), by the title and forward...
Article
Full-text available
Participants generated both autobiographical memories (AMs) that they believed to be true and intentionally fabricated autobiographical memories (IFAMs). Memories were constructed while a concurrent memory load (random 8-digit sequence) was held in mind or while there was no concurrent load. Amount and accuracy of recall of the concurrent memory lo...
Article
Full-text available
Participants generated both autobiographical memories (AMs) that they believed to be true and intentionally fabricated autobiographical memories (IFAMs). Memories were constructed while a concurrent memory load (random 8-digit sequence) was held in mind or while there was no concurrent load. Amount and accuracy of recall of the concurrent memory lo...
Conference Paper
Abstract: Narrative thinking takes place in the brain’s default network. Previously referred to as daydreaming or mind wandering, the central proposal of narrative thinking is that thought sequences, correlated with default network activation, are more structured, purposeful, and directed than previously thought. Narrative thinking features, among...
Article
The complainants’ memory of the rape is commonly the key and frequently the only evidence in the investigation and prosecution of rape allegations. Details, specificity and consistency in the victim’s recollection are central criteria that criminal justice agents – police, prosecutors and juries – use to assess the credibility of the victim account...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The processes underlying the generation of truthful (AMs) and intentionally fabricated autobiographical memories (IFAMs) were investigated. Memories of everyday events were constructed while a concurrent memory load (random 8-digit sequence) was held in mind or while there was no concurrent load. Participants recalled fewer digits of the concurrent...
Article
Remembering and imagining are intricately related, particularly in imagining the future: episodic future thinking. It is proposed that remembering the recent past and imagining the near future take place in what we term the remembering–imagining system. The remembering–imagining system renders recently formed episodic memories and episodic imagined...
Article
Objectives To examine the impact of memory accessibility on episodic future thinking. Design Single case study of neurological patient HCM and an age-matched comparison group of neurologically healthy controls. Methods We administered a full battery of tests assessing general intelligence, memory and executive functioning. To assess autobiographica...
Article
Full-text available
We suggest that the Self Attention Network (SAN) maybe part of a larger self-regulatory system, which we term the Self-Relevance System (SRS) of which the "core" or default network is a major part. It is within the core network that memories are generated and the future imagined. Such memories and imaginings are the basis of preoccupations. Within...
Article
Full-text available
Recording the events of a day in a diary may help improve their later accessibility. An interesting question is whether improvements in long-term accessibility will be greater if the diary is completed at the end of the day, or after a period of sleep, the following morning. We investigated this question using an internet-based diary method. On eac...
Article
Full-text available
The Self-Memory System encompasses the working self, autobiographical memory and episodic memory. Specific autobiographical memories are patterns of activation over knowledge structures in autobiographical and episodic memory brought about by the activating effect of cues. The working self can elaborate cues based on the knowledge they initially ac...
Article
Full-text available
This research investigated the influence of culture and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on global autobiographical remembering (Study 1a) and on the phenomenological properties (Study 1b) and memory-content variables (Study 1c) of trauma-specific autobiographical remembering. Australian, British, and Iranian trauma survivors with and without P...
Article
Full-text available
When memory is the only evidence in, for instance, a criminal trial, how is it to be evaluated? This article shows how everyday beliefs about memory often run counter to the scientific evidence and how they can mislead in legal settings. We argue that judges, jurors, barristers, solicitors, and indeed any trier-of-fact, all need to be aware of what...
Article
Full-text available
We review the contributions to this Special Issue that highlight the diverse ways in which memory takes place that go beyond the standard personal autobiographical memory and its reliance on internal imagery. We look at how contributors explore a highly individual memory of trauma and re-consider it as a complex, socially contested phenomenon. We n...
Article
Full-text available
In a memory survey adult respondents recalled, dated, and described two earliest positive and negative memories that they were highly confident were memories. They then answered a series of questions that focused on memory details such as, clothing, duration, weather, etc. Few differences were found between positive and negative memories that on av...
Article
I describe three legal cases in which I acted as a memory expert witness. The cases contain remarkable accounts of memories. Such memories are by no means unusual in legal cases, are often over retention intervals measured in decades, and contain details the specificity of which is highly unusual. For example, recalling from childhood verbatim conv...
Article
The Remember-Know paradigm is commonly used to examine experiential states during recognition. In this paradigm, whether a Know response is defined as a High-confidence state of certainty or a Low-confidence state based on familiarity varies across researchers, and differences in definitions and instructions have been shown to influence participant...
Conference Paper
A significant body of research has established key similarities and differences between remembering the past and imagining the future. However, although past and future thinking tasks draw upon autobiographical knowledge, only future thinking involves imagination. To elucidate whether past-future differences are attributable to imagination per se,...
Article
Full-text available
Episodic future thinking (EFT) has been linked with our ability to remember past events. However, its specific neurocognitive subprocesses have remained elusive. In Experiment 1, a study of healthy older adults was conducted to investigate the candidate subprocesses of EFT. Participants completed a standard EFT cue word task, two memory measures (V...
Article
Full-text available
Information that is relevant to oneself tends to be remembered more than information that relates to other people, but the role of attention in eliciting this "self-reference effect" is unclear. In the present study, we assessed the importance of attention in self-referential encoding using an ownership paradigm, which required participants to enco...
Article
Full-text available
Studies exploring mental time travel commonly use cue-word paradigms to elicit past and future autobiographical events. However, the effect of trial duration (how long participants are allowed to describe events) on the relationship between episodic and nonepisodic detail and episodic specificity (i.e., whether longer durations increase event speci...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of the experiment reported here was to investigate the processes underlying the construction of truthful and deliberately fabricated memories. Properties of memories created to be intentionally false (fabricated memories) were compared to properties of memories believed to be true (true memories). Participants recalled and then wrote or spo...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter describes my experiences a memory expert witness and how these led to a major report by the British Psychological Society on memory and the law. The aim of this report was to provide a set of guidelines about human memory that were agreed by a broad range of memory researchers and supported by scientific findings. The intention was to...
Poster
Full-text available
The present study investigated the effect of cognitive load when generating true and intentionally fabricated autobiographical memories. It was found that cognitive load impacted more on fabricated than truthful memories, indicating that the generation phase of memory retrieval is more cognitively effortful for intentionally fabricated than truthfu...
Book
Can the psychodynamics of the mind be correlated with neurodynamic processes in the brain? The book revisits this important question - one that scientists and psychoanalysts have been asking for more than a century. Freud envisioned that the separation between the two approaches was just a temporary limitation that future scientific progress would...
Article
From the Couch to the Lab brings together internationally renowned contributors from the fields of psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and neuropsychoanalysis and addresses the technological and methodological innovations in neuroscience that allow unprecedented insight into the neurobiological basis of topics such as empathy, embodiment and emotional co...
Article
Full-text available
Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness, which affects sense of identity. While the ability to have a coherent vision of the self (i.e., self-images) relies partly on its reciprocal relationships with autobiographical memories, little is known about how memories ground "self-images" in schizophrenia. Twenty-five patients with schizophrenia and 25...
Article
Full-text available
Cognitive theories suggest that individuals often ignore information of no personal relevance, while attending to and remembering information important to them. Will this tendency become more salient in a context of culturally sustained egocentrism and self-focus, influencing how individuals perceive and retain information beyond immediate personal...
Article
Full-text available
Five experiments using the think/no-think (TNT) procedure investigated the effect of the no-think and substitute instructions on cued recall. In Experiment 1, when unrelated A-B paired associates were studied and cued for recall with A items, recall rates were reliably enhanced in the think condition and reliably impaired below baseline in the no-t...
Article
Full-text available
The reminiscence bump is the tendency to recall more autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood than from adjacent lifetime periods. In this online study, the robustness of the reminiscence bump was examined by looking at participants' judgements about the quality of football players. Dutch participants (N = 619) were asked who...
Article
Full-text available
Forgetting is a normal and everyday occurrence that may sometimes reflect a complete loss of the mnemonic record or a failure to encode it in the first place. However, on many occasions with the help of cues we can eventually or suddenly recall a memory that seemed to be lost, thus highlighting the probability that many instances of "forgetting" ma...
Article
Both Loewald's relational theory of memory and the Self-Memory System (SMS) of cognitive neuroscience describe a dual memory system, one system that is experience-near sensory-perceptual, and the other, symbolic and conceptual. In contrast to perspectives that locate therapeutic action in either altering implicit procedural memories or interpreting...
Conference Paper
The Cognitive Interview (CI) is a popular tool to elicit more details from witnesses. However, its efficacy as a lie detection tool has, to our knowledge, never been examined. The present study investigated how respondents might perform when told to give true versus untrue accounts of a remembered event. Our study took place across two tests sessio...
Article
Full-text available
Self-projection, the capacity to re-experience the personal past and to mentally infer another person's perspective, has been linked to medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In particular, ventral mPFC is associated with inferences about one's own self, whereas dorsal mPFC is associated with inferences about another individual. In the present fMRI study...
Article
Although schizophrenia alters the sense of personal identity, little is known about the impact of illness-related autobiographical events on patients' self-representation. We investigated self-defining memories (SDM) in 24 patients with schizophrenia and 24 controls to explore how illness-related SDM were integrated into the self at both the cognit...
Article
Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness affecting sense of identity. Autobiographical memory deficits observed in schizophrenia could contribute to this altered sense of identity. The ability to give a meaning to personally significant events (meaning making) is also critical for identity construction and self-coherence. Twenty-four patients with...
Article
Full-text available
Flashbulb memory (FBM) refers to the vivid memory for the context of learning about a public news event. Past research has identified a number of factors that influence the formation of FBM, such as the importance of the event, the experience of intense emotions, and the amount of post-event rehearsal. Although such factors may be universal in pred...
Article
This study investigated whether temporal clustering of autobiographical memories (AMs) around periods of self-development (Rathbone, Moulin, & Conway, 2008, 2009) would also occur when imagining future events associated with the self. Participants completed an AM task and future thinking task. In both tasks, memories and future events were cued usi...
Article
Full-text available
Gender differences are frequently observed in autobiographical memory (AM). However, few studies have investigated the neural basis of potential gender differences in AM. In the present functional MRI (fMRI) study we investigated gender differences in AMs elicited using dynamic visual images vs verbal cues. We used a novel technology called a Sense...
Chapter
Accessing Information in Long-Term MemoryMemory RepresentationsUncontrolled Direct Retrieval: A Case StudyConcluding CommentsReferences