
Norman R. BrownUniversity of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Psychology
Norman R. Brown
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85
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
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January 1992 - present
Publications
Publications (85)
This study examined the how immigration affects the organization and contents of autobiographical memory. The 40 middle-aged individuals who participated in this study were at least in their 30s when relocating from China to Canada. The participants retrieved personal memories in response to neutral cue words, thought aloud as they dated the retrie...
General Audience Summary
Our lives are boring, or at least repetitive. Oddly enough, this basic fact has been ignored by researchers interested in autobiographical memory. In this article, I summarize a theory, Transition Theory (T²), developed in response to this situation; I also review a project, the Living-in-History project, which motivated it...
Life transitions like war, marriage, and immigration presumably organize autobiographical memory. Yet little is known about how the magnitude of a given transition affects this mnemonic impact. To examine this issue, we collected (a) word-cued events, (b) event-dating protocols, (c) personally important events, and (d) transitional impact scores of...
Natural disasters are large-scale catastrophic events, and they are increasing in frequency and severity. Converging evidence indicates that the mental health consequences of disasters are extensive and are often associated with trauma and the disruption of personal and socioeconomic factors in people's lives. Although most individuals experiencing...
In this commentary on Pillemer et al. (2024), we aimed to highlight a particular type of vicarious memories and their functional significance by exploring the transmission of conflict-related memories across generations, shifting the focus from personal to collective memory. We discuss how historical family memories influence the subsequent generat...
In two experiments, we systematically investigated the reasons why people retained certain autobiographical events in their memory, as well as the properties of those events and their predicted memorability. The first experiment used three methods (word-cued, free-recalled, and “memorable, interesting, and/or important”) to retrieve event memories,...
Natural disasters pose an increasing threat to individuals and their well-being. Although much is known about the short-term effects of a disaster, there has been much less work on how disasters affect individuals over long periods. Additionally, disaster research has traditionally focused either on the mental outcome or economic impacts, limiting...
In WIREs Cognitive Science
In contrast to much theoretical work on the topic, Transition Theory (Brown, 2016, 2021) attempts to account for important aspects of autobiographical memory in a way that emphasizes the structure of experience, rather than the relation between personal-event memories and the Self. This article provides the rationale for...
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of people’s lives across the globe. It is also unique in the way it changed their lives. In this entry, a framework, the Transition Theory, is outlined, which is used to interpret the transitional properties of this pandemic, the ways it differs from other transitional events, and how it impacts the l...
In the current study, we investigated the organization of autobiographical memory in view of the Living-in-History effect, which is visible when personal memory and historical memory become intertwined. We investigated how often participants dated their own personal recollections with reference to important historical events (such as the Fall of Co...
Memory champions remember vast amounts of information in order and at first encounter by associating each study item to an anchor within a scaffold - a pre-learned, structured memory. The scaffold provides direct-access retrieval cues. Dominated by the familiar-route scaffold (Method of Loci), researchers have little insight into what characteristi...
To explore the strategy use in associative recognition, we constructed two word-triplet lists to represent the information networks in the real world featured by repetition, co-occurrence, and change. We predicted that word-triplet recognition would depend upon the co-occurrence of repeated context words and non-repeated unique words within a list,...
The experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic has varied considerably from individual-to-individual. Little is known about the changes in the level of experience general people went through during the first few months after the coronavirus (COVID-19) was declared as a Pandemic. This longitudinal qualitative study explores the general public’s reports of...
The present study examined the beliefs about two types of important life transitions: transitions that are consistent with the cultural life script (e.g., getting married) and transitions that diverge from it (e.g., relocating). Data were collected from two conditions: individuals in the experienced condition only responded to transitions they had...
The COVID-19 Pandemic is unique in its near universal scope and in the way that it has changed our lives. These facts suggest that it might also be unique in its effects on memory. A framework outlined in this article, Transition Theory, is used to explicate the mnemonically relevant ways in which the onset of the Pandemic differs from other person...
In this article, we report the results of a survey of North American adults (n = 1,215) conducted between March 24 and 30, 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents completed the COVID-TIS (Transitional Impact Scale-Pandemic version) and the 21-item Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS), indicated their level of COVID-infection...
Early accounts of judgmental anchoring attribute the effect to a deliberate, but insufficient, adjustment process; more recent theories point to automatic, priming-based processes as the underlying cause. In this article we introduce a novel anchor assessment manipulation and a decompositional analysis of the standard anchoring effect to determine...
The post-comparison anchoring effect occurs when numerical responses assimilate to a previously considered standard of comparison (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). In this article, we describe a new approach to this phenomenon. This Mix Reactions Account, which takes a Grice-influenced analysis of the anchoring task as its starting point, assumes that an...
The present study examined the intergenerational factors in transmitting autobiographical memories from one generation to the next. Older adults from Beijing, China reported a collection of personally important autobiographical memories and their middle-aged children recalled important parental memories. The parent-child dyads independently recalle...
The two surveys summarized in this chapter provide evidence consistent with two accounts of the partner discrepancy – the well-established finding that men report more opposite-sex sexual partners (SPs) than women (Laumann et al., 1994). Consistent with the strategies differences account (Brown & Sinclair, 1999), we found that: (a) people used a va...
In this article, we first outline a minimalist approach to the organization of autobiographical memory called transition theory. This theory assumes that the content and organization of autobiographical memory mirror the structure of experience and reflect the operation of basic memory processes. Thus, this approach rests on an analysis of the envi...
Intergenerational transmission of memory is a process by which biographical knowledge contributes to the construction of collective memory (representation of a shared past). We investigated the intergenerational transmission of war-related memories and social-distance attitudes in second-generation post-war Croatians. We compared 2 groups of young...
Previous research showed that transitional events causing catastrophic and long-lasting changes in group of people’s lives (e.g., wars) create autobiographical periods. We investigated whether spinal cord injury (SCI), an involuntary and externally driven disruptive event at the individual level would also act as a temporal landmark and spawn perso...
It can be argued that the Collapse of the Soviet Union was the most important historical event of the past 50 years. This study assessed the mnemonic impact of this event in Russia, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan. It involved three tasks. First, participants thought aloud as dated autobiographical events. Second, they drew a personal timeline. Finally,...
Transitions in parents’ formative years play an important role in the
memory of parents’ life stories, esp. participants’ own birth.
The current study replicates prior findings obtained from adult
children of Canadians, non-Asian refugees and immigrants (Svob &
Brown, 2012).
For Chinese-Canadian group, transitions that pile up after parents’...
The field of autobiographical memory has made dramatic advances since the first collection of papers in the area was published in 1986. Now, over 25 years on, this book reviews and integrates the many theories, perspectives, and approaches that have evolved over the last decades. A truly eminent collection of editors and contributors appraise the b...
The Transitional Impact Scale (TIS) advances the measurement of event cognition into the real world. The TIS was created to provide a measure of change for important life transitions, including an index of their transitional properties and magnitude. Pilot work prior to Study 1 led to the creation of a 95-item version (TIS-95). A principal componen...
The Living in History (LiH) effect is a litmus test for the degree to which historical events reorganise autobiographical memory. The LiH effect was studied in two Lebanese samples: a Beiruti sample that lived in the epicentre of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and another group from the Bi'qa region who lived in an area that was indirec...
How do people compare quantitative attributes of real-world objects? (e.g., Which country has the higher per capita GDP, Mauritania or Nepal?). The research literature on this question is divided: Although researchers in the 1970s and 1980s assumed that a 2-stage magnitude comparison process underlies these types of judgments (Banks, 1977), more re...
In the study reported here, we investigated intergenerational transmission of life stories in two groups of young adults: a conflict group and a nonconflict group. Only participants in the conflict group had parents who lived through violent political upheaval. All participants recalled and dated 10 important events from one of their parents' lives...
In this study, we used process measures to understand how people recall autobiographical memories in response to different word cues. In Experiment 1, participants provided verbal protocols when cued by object and emotion words. Participants also reported whether memories had come directly to mind. The self-reports and independent ratings of the ve...
Participants studied lists of multiply presented converging associates (e.g.,bed, dream, pillow, etc.) and were timed as they estimated how often they saw list items, related foils (e.g.,blanket), and non-presented critical items (SLEEP). Average number of repetitions (few [3] vs. many [6]) and repetition variability
(fixed vs. variable) were manip...
Two generations of psychologists have been interested in understanding binary choice under uncertainty. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers assumed that people rely on a two-stage magnitude comparison process to make these decisions (Banks, 1977; Moyer & Dumais, 1978). More recently, the focus has shifted to approaches that rely on probabilistic cu...
In this article, we summarize a cross‐national research programme, the Living‐in‐History Project, investigating the impact of war, terrorism and natural disaster on the organization of autobiographical memory. More specifically, the aims of this project were: (a) to develop a method for assessing the impact of public events on autobiographical memo...
Prior research has identified two modes of quantitative estimation: numerical retrieval and ordinal conversion. In this paper we introduce a third mode, which operates by a feature-based inference process. In contrast to prior research, the results of three experiments demonstrate that people estimate automobile prices by combining metric informati...
Memories of war, terrorism, and natural disaster play a critical role in the construction of group identity and the persistence of group conflict. Here, we argue that personal memory and knowledge of the collective past become entwined only when public events have a direct, forceful, and prolonged impact on a population. Support for this position c...
Prior research indicates that enumeration-based frequency estimation strategies become increasingly common as memory for relevant event instances improves and that moderate levels of context memory are associated with moderate rates of enumeration [Brown, N. R. (1995). Estimation strategies and the judgment of event frequency. Journal of Experiment...
Most sexual health research depends on self-reported information, but little is known about the ways in which individuals arrive at their responses to sexual behavior questions. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the cognitive strategies and contextual cues used to recall sexual behaviors among men and women at high risk for HIV...
Mental health questionnaires often ask respondents to report how frequently they experience different emotions. We report two experiments designed to assess the accuracy of these reports and the strategies used to generate them. Each day for 2 weeks, participants in Experiment 1 filled out a web-based emotions-and-activities checklist. Then, they e...
We examined some potential causes of bias in geographic location estimates by comparing location estimates of North American cities made by Canadian, U.S., and Mexican university students. All three groups placed most Mexican cities near the equator, which implies that all three groups were influenced by shared beliefs about the locations of geogra...
Event clusters are narrative-like memory structures that draw together information about causally and thematically related events (Brown & Schopflocher, 1998a, 1998b). Prior research, using a method called event cueing, indicates that clusters play an important role in the organization of autobiographical memory and suggests that cluster formation...
This study investigates the causes of event-dating biases. Two hundred participants provided knowledge ratings and date estimates for 64 news events. Four independent groups dated the same events under different boundary constraints. Analysis across all responses showed that forward telescoping decreased with boundary age, concurring with the bound...
A series of three studies examines potential consumer confusion associated with the advertising copy used to describe cause-related marketing (CRM) campaigns, where money is donated to a charity each time a consumer makes a purchase. The first study assesses the relative frequency of various copy formats in CRM on the Internet. The authors find tha...
This study examined delay related changes of people's recollections for 11th September 2001. 1481 participants were surveyed 4-24 hours or 10 days after the event. 142 participants were re-tested in April, 2002. Test-retest consistency was low after seven months (66.5%). Word counts for open ended descriptions revealed that people wrote significant...
A series of five studies examine potential consumer confusion associated with the "percentage of profit" wording often used to describe cause-related marketing in which money is donated to a charity each time a consumer makes a purchase. The initial four studies demonstrate that (1) expressing the donation amount as a percentage of profit leads to...
We report two experiments about how people estimate the frequency of event properties when they are explicitly (e.g, spinach-GREEN) and implicitly (e.g, spinach) presented. In Experiment 1, verbal reports indicated that, for explicitly presented properties, participants used several retrieval- and impression-based strategies and were relatively acc...
Children and university students (N=58) estimated the locations of major cities in North America. At age 9, a distinct home region was apparent, but no differentiation between northern US and Canadian cities. At 11, four developments were observed: Children divided North America into regions that were not based solely on national boundaries but wer...
More people live in Ethiopia (64 million) than in the Untied Kingdom (59 million). Located at 34 ° north latitude, Atlanta, Georgia is just one degree north of Tijuana Mexico. At the moment, Bill Gates is worth about $64 billion; the GDP of Tunisia (with its population of 9.7 million people) was $63 billion in 2000. Montreal is about 2900 kilometer...
Estimates of national population were studied in two experiments. In Experiment 1, Canadian and Chinese undergraduates rated their knowledge of 112 countries and then estimated the population of each. In Experiment 2, Canadians rated their knowledge of 52 countries and then provided population estimates for these primed countries and for a comparab...
We examined alternate explanations for distortions in the subjective representation of North American geography. One explanation, based on physical proximity, predicts that bias in location estimates should increase with the distance from a participant's home city or region. An alternative is that biases arise from combining accurate and inaccurate...
From childhood, each of us develops our own personal set of theories and beliefs about the world in which we live. Given the impossibility of knowing about every event that can ever take place, we use cognitive short cuts to try to predict and make sense of the world around us. One of the fundamental pieces of information we use to predict future e...
The development of a well-formulated view of the memory storage systems (lexicons) involved in word recognition is a central goal of research on language processes. Assumptions about the organizing characteristics and structures of these memory systems are found in various discussions of lexical neighborhoods (Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, & Besne...
To determine why North Americans tend to locate European cities south of North American cities at similar latitudes (Tversky, 1981), we had observers provide bearing estimates between cities in the U.S. and Europe. Earlier research using latitude estimates of these cities has indicated that each continent has several subjective regions (Friedman &...
vation of representations such as "it purrs," "it has fur," "it has a tail" provides a reader with knowledge that the word is "cat." Words that share many features are semantic neighbors and the spread of activation reflects the number of shared features (e.g., as features for CAT are activated, several features of its near-neighbor FOX become acti...
Exposure to a few task-relevant numerical facts (seed facts) often improves subsequent numerical estimates. We performed two experiments to investigate the mechanism that produces these seeding effects. In Experiment 1, participants estimated national populations; in Experiment 2, they estimated between-city distances. In both, items were selected...
In 2 experiments, the authors investigated how representations of global geography are updated when people learn new location information about individual cities. Participants estimated the latitude of cities in North America (Experiment 1) and in the Old and New Worlds (Experiment 2). After making their first estimates, participants were given inf...
In 2 experiments, the authors investigated how representations of global geography are updated when people learn new location information about individual cities. Participants estimated the latitude of cities in North America (Experiment 1) and in the Old and New Worlds (Experiment 2). After making their first estimates, participants were given inf...
To understand the nature and etiology of biases in geographical judgments, the authors asked people to estimate latitudes (Experiments 1 and 2) and longitudes (Experiments 3 and 4) of cities throughout the Old and New Worlds. They also examined how people's biased geographical judgments change after they receive accurate information ("seeds") about...
On surveys, men report two to four times as many lifetime opposite‐sex sexual partners (SPs) as women. However, these estimates should be equivalent because each new sexual partner for a man is also a new sexual partner for a woman. The source of this discrepancy was investigated in this study. Participants reported number of lifetime and past‐year...
A description of semantic lexicon arrangement is a central goal in examinations of language processing. There are a number of ways in which this description has been cast and a host of different mechanisms in place for providing operational descriptions (e.g., feature sharing, category membership, associations, and cooccurrences). We first review t...
The present study employed a method called event cuing to investigate the organization of autobiographical memory. The unique feature of this method is the use of event descriptions as retrieval cues. Participants first recalled a set of personal events. Next, they responded to each of these cuing events by retrieving a second related personal even...
When people answer survey questions of the form "During the past month, how many times did you...?" their responses provide valuable data for researchers and policy makers. Yet the way respondents produce their answers to these "behavioural frequency questions" is not well understood. This article demonstrates that survey respondents can use an arr...
Forward telescoping, the reporting or dating of events as being more recent than they actually were, is often observed in surveys and produces inaccurate data. We believe that some forward telescoping occurs when the question format allows people to respond without extensive retrieval of temporal information concerning the target events. We collect...
This article provides an overview of a series of event-cueing experiments conducted to investigate how autobiographical memory is organized at the event level. In these experiments, participants ®rst generate a set of personal events (cueing events) and then respond to each by retrieving a second event memory (the cued event). Subsequently, relatio...
When people estimate event frequency, they sometimes retrieve and count event instances. This study demonstrates a direct relation between the use of these enumeration-based strategies and the contents of memory. In 3 experiments, participants studied target-context word pairs, estimated presentation frequency for target words, and recalled context...
When people estimate event frequency, they sometimes retrieve and count event instances. This study demonstrates a direct relation between the use of these enumeration-based strategies and the contents of memory. In 3 experiments, participants studied target–context word pairs, estimated presentation frequency for target words, and recalled context...
Exposure to numerical examples (seed facts) produced a substantial long-term reduction in domain-specific innumeracy. In particular, learning the populations of 24 seed countries improved accuracy of estimates of the populations of 75 untrained countries, both at the time of learning and 4 months later. Consistent with abstraction-based theories of...
Processes underlying judgments of absolute event frequency were investigated in 3 experiments. In all 3, word pairs consisting of a target (a category label, e.g., CITY) and context (a category exemplar, e.g., London) were presented in a different-or same-context study list. In the different-context condition, each target was paired with a new cont...
Banaji and Crowder (see record
1990-00387-001) contend "that the movement to develop an ecologically valid psychology of memory has proven itself largely bankrupt" (p. 1185). The authors have two primary concerns. First, they believe that it is rare for studies of real-world cognition to support conclusions that generalize broadly. Second, they ar...
Estimation is influenced by a variety of processes: application of heuristics, domain-specific reasoning, and intuitive statistical induction, among them. In this article, we propose the metrics and mapping framework to account for how these processes are integrated to generate estimates. This framework identifies 2 types of information as critical...
In two parallel experiments, conducted 17 months apart, we examined the relations among population estimates, availability, and media coverage of the 100 countries with populations of 4 million or more. The results were consistent with the main hypothesis, that availability influences population estimates. Specifically, we found that (1) rated know...
In two parallel experiments, conducted 17 months apart, we examined the relations among population estimates, availability,
and media coverage of the 100 countries with populations of 4 million or more. The results were consistent with the main hypothesis,
that availability influences population estimates. Specifically, we found that (1) rated know...
College students appear to subjectively organize U.S. presidents into three groups and to use this organization to help them learn new information. Results of a paired comparison task in Experiment 1 suggested that subjects organized the presidents into Founding Fathers (Washington through John Quincy Adams), post-World War II presidents (Truman th...
A model of "historical memory" is proposed. This model identifies three primary levels of organization (the news event, the public narrative, the historical period) and allows public events to be associated with personal information. Three experiments were conducted to evaluate this model: a verbal protocol study, a response time study, and a free-...
This paper presents a conceptual discussion of four human operator models that are potentially useful for supervisory control applications: the operator function model (Mitchell, 1987), the problem behavior graph (Newell and Simon, 1972), the decision ladder (Rasmussen, 1986), and goal-means network (Woods and Hollnagel, 1987). These models are cha...
Autobiographical memory is a major form of human memory. it is the basis of most psycotherapies, an important repository of legal, historical, and literary information, and, in some views, the source of the concept of self. When it fails, it is the focus of serious complaints in many neurological disorders. This timely book brings together and inte...
This research explores the problem of how people determine the time of public events, such as the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan or the Three-Mile Island accident. According to what here is called the accessibility principle, the subjective dates of these events depend in part on the amount that can be recalled about them: The more known,...
explore how the knowledge people have of recent history (public memories) is linked to their knowledge of their lives (personal or autobiographical memories) / suppose that a public event is conceived partly as a datum in our broader knowledge of current history, partly as a datum in our knowledge of our own life story
describe the results of a s...