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Understanding autobiographical memory: an ecological theory
Abstract
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 basic neural systems of autobiographical memory; its underlying cognitive structures and retrieval processes; how it develops in infancy and childhood, and then breaks down in aging; its social and cultural aspects; and its relation to personality and the self. Autobiographical memory has demonstrated a strong ability to establish clear empirical generalizations, and has shown its practical relevance by deepening our understanding of several clinical disorders - as well as the induction of false memories in the legal system. It has also become an important topic for brain studies, and helped to enlarge our general understanding of the brain.
... As far as Neisser's (1982a;1988b; theoretical contributions about self and narrative processes are concerned, their influence on the contemporary literature on autobiographical memory is much broader compared with the other Neisser's contributions, either empirical or theoretical, which have been considered in the present article. Indeed, all the most important current theories of autobiographical memory have explored the connections between the latter, the self, and autobiographical narrative processes (Berntsen & Rubin, 2012;Conway et al., 2004;Rubin, 2019). These connections are also the target of a bulk of empirical research (for reviews, see Fivush & Haden, 2003;Libby & Eibach, 2007;Sotgiu, 2021a) ...
... In conclusion, I want to make clear that my purpose has not been to demonstrate for the first time that Neisser was a prominent scholar in the field of psychology of autobiographical memory. That seems to be well recognized by a number of contemporary memory researchers (Berntsen & Rubin, 2012;Hyman Jr., 1999;Sotgiu, 2021a). Yet, in my opinion, the current article has at least one merit: that is, it casts light on the connections between Neisser's work on autobiographical memory accuracy and contemporary theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions on a variety of issues relating to the field of autobiographical memory psychology. ...
Ulric Neisser was the initiator of the contemporary psychology of autobiographical memory, as well as the founder of the ecological approach to human cognition. The present article reviews his empirical and theoretical contributions to an issue which is at the heart of the contemporary debate on autobiographical memory: that is, autobiographical memory accuracy. From the early 1980s to the mid‐1990s, Neisser empirically investigated this topic in a variety of memory research fields including legal testimony, flashbulb memory, and childhood memory. Overall, the empirical studies that Neisser conducted in these fields led him to conceptualize autobiographical memory as a reconstructive process serving the specific goals pursued by the rememberer at a particular time and place, and dynamically varying according to the social context in which autobiographical experiences are recalled. In the conclusions, the author discusses the influence of Neisser's empirical and theoretical work on autobiographical memory accuracy on the current memory literature.
... The ability to consciously remember personally experienced events and recall them as coherent narratives, plays an important role in defining identity, engaging in social interactions, and providing direction in life (Berntsen & Rubin, 2012;Bluck, 2003). Such memories, known as autobiographical memories, emerge in the early years of life (Reese, 2009). ...
... As highlighted in the social-cultural development theory (Nelson & Fivush, 2004) and Valentino's (2011) model, the development of autobiographical memory is intimately intertwined with a child's social-cultural environment. The knowledge of social roles, individual goals, self-theories, and beliefs all shape individuals' interpretations of their behaviors and perspectives, thereby, enabling individuals to determine the retention of particular personal information that can sustain these belief systems (Berntsen & Rubin, 2012;Wang & Conway, 2004). For example, in Western cultural contexts (e.g., United States, Australia), where individual uniqueness and autonomy are highly valued (autonomy-oriented), autobiographical memories of specific events with distinct personal experiences are critical for individuals to distinguish themselves from others (Ho, Chen, Hoffman, Guan, & Iversen, 2013). ...
Maternal reminiscing styles and mother–child memory features were examined in a cross‐cultural context. Fifty‐five Chinese (Guangzhou, China) and 48 Australian (Melbourne, Australia) mother–child dyads (child age: 3–6 years) independently retrieved autobiographical memories and jointly discussed past events. Australian mothers used greater elaborative and supportive reminiscing and provided more specific memories than Chinese mothers. Australian children provided greater memory elaboration than Chinese children, but they did not differ in memory specificity. Maternal reminiscing styles and cultural group were independently predictive of child memory elaboration but not specificity. Nonetheless, moderation analyses showed that the two maternal reminiscing styles (elaborative and supportive) interacted to predict child memory specificity. These findings indicate the importance of culture and types of reminiscing on memory development.
... According to Bauer (2012Bauer ( , 2015 this is likely to reflect fragile memory traces early in childhood due to poorer consolidation, and reconsolidation. As suggested by Berntsen and Rubin (2012), more rapid forgetting due to less efficient reconsolidation processes in early childhood may reflect a dominance of involuntary rehearsal of past events in young children. According to Berntsen (2012), involuntary remembering is an important form of rehearsal that is likely to support consolidation and reconsolidation of past events. ...
... This type of rehearsal therefore is likely to lead to a different, and probably more fragile, type of consolidation of past events, as compared to voluntary, strategic recall. Accelerated forgetting of events during early childhood may be the result (Berntsen & Rubin, 2012). ...
Many parents have experienced incidents in which their preschool child spontaneously (i.e., without prompting of any kind) recall a previously experienced event. Until recently, such spontaneous memories had only been examined in non-controlled settings (e.g., diary studies). Using a novel experimental paradigm, a previous study has shown that when young children are brought back to a highly distinct setting (same room, same experimenter, same furnishing), in which they previously experienced an interesting event (a Teddy or a Game event), spontaneous memories can be triggered. However, exactly which cues (or combination of cues) are effective for the children’s memory, remains unknown. Here, we used this novel paradigm to examine the possible impact of contextual cues at the time of retrieval. We manipulated whether the 35-month-old children returned to the same room (n = 40) or to a different, but similarly furnished, room (n = 40) after one week. The results revealed that although the children returning to a new room produced fewer spontaneous memories than the children returning to the same room, the difference was not significant. Interestingly, despite changing rooms, the children still produced spontaneous memories. Taken together the results may shed new light on the mechanisms underlying childhood amnesia.
... Memories for personal events from our lives constitute basic, yet crucial, building blocks when we consider, communicate, and reflect upon whom we are and how each of us has become the person we are (Bauer, 2007). Likewise, autobiographical memories help us to learn from our past experiences and to plan for our personal future (Berntsen & Rubin, 2012b). As such, one may think that autobiographical memories for long would have been granted a firm position within the field of psychology. ...
... This implies that in order to present valid stimulus material for studying autobiographical memories, researchers have been forced to employ other methodologies (e.g., diary studies and questionnaires) than the standard paradigm for memory studies, that is, laboratory experiments. Second and closely related to the first reason, obtaining valid and reliable data from people's personal event memories counters the problem of accuracy (Berntsen & Rubin, 2012b). For obvious reasons, the to-be-remembered events from people's own lives are more difficult to assess, validate, and control compared with the to-be-remembered material one can present and manipulate in the laboratory. ...
This article serves as an introduction to this volume's Nordic Psychology Special Issue on autobiographical memory. We were given the opportunity to present examples from the ‘growth layer’ from the Center on Autobiographical Memory Research (CON AMORE), located at Aarhus University. This is displayed by the fact that all six articles in the present volume have PhD students as first authors. Although quite different issues are covered, the articles as a whole do not provide an exhaustive review on autobiographical memory research. Rather, the contributions are constrained by the topics that each PhD students is working on. Especially two themes, that recently both have received a lot of interest in the field, are prominent across the contributions: Cultural Life Scripts, and Mental Time Travel. Before introducing each article, a brief general outline on autobiographical memory and how the field has developed so far is offered.
... For additions and omissions, focus was on differences in overall consistency (measured by word count and supported by omissions and additions) rather than the exact verbatim content of omissions and additions. The complexities of autobiographical memory have been noted in previous research (Barnier et al., 2008;Berntsen and Rubin, 2012) and 'r' has been utilised for inter-rater reliability in autobiographical memory research (Barnier et al., 2014;Lempert et al., 2020;Ridout et al., 2023). ...
Contradictions and other changes across recollections are interpreted negatively in some settings. This may be problematic because who we share our memories with may affect what we recollect. In our research, we used a retelling paradigm for autobiographical memory to investigate how perceived audience influences consistency of repeated personal memory accounts. Participants free-recalled memories of four autobiographical events either to an imagined police officer, psychologist or friend. One week later, they recalled the same events again to the same imagined audience. Memory accounts changed across recollections, with most participants making omissions, additions and contradictions. Some changes varied across conditions. Participants in the friend condition were least consistent in amount of information provided. Participants in the police officer condition contradicted themselves on details about people present. However, overall audience context did not reliably influence consistency of accounts, rather changes were common. Findings broaden our understanding of social influence on autobiographical memory.
... 31). As we know both from philosophy and from research on episodic and autobiographical memory, accounts of personal events are always located in time and space, and linked to a person's self and development (Berntsen and Rubin, 2012). ...
Long before experimental psychology, religious writers, orators, and playwrights described examples of lie detection based on the verbal content of statements. Legal scholars collected evidence from individual cases and systematized them as “rules of evidence”. Some of these resemble content cues used in contemporary research, while others point to working hypotheses worth exploring. To examine their potential validity, we re-analyzed data from a quasi-experimental study of 95 perjury cases. The outcomes support the fruitfulness of this approach. Travelling back in time searching for testable ideas about content cues to truth and deception may be worthwhile.
... Autobiographical reasoning evolves in social interactions and is therefore fundamentally a social-cultural process [39,40]. Each type of coherence has its own characteristic developmental trajectory and builds upon social-cognitive abilities (e.g., perspective taking, creating overarching temporal links, capacity for self-reflection) [38,41]. ...
Individuals build a narrative identity through the construction of an internalised, unfolding life story based on significant autobiographical memories. The current study validated a Dutch version of the Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire (ANIQ-NL), which assesses how aware individuals are of having a narrative identity as well as their perception of the global coherence within their autobiographical memories, specifically, in terms of temporal ordering, causal connections and thematic integration. The questionnaire was administered to 541 adults (65.1% female, Mage = 34.09, SDage = 15.04, age range = 18–75). The results of a confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence for a four-factor structure, consisting of awareness and the three coherence subscales. The factor loadings of the items varied between .67 and .96. Moreover, the ANIQ-NL subscales showed good to excellent internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alphas ranging from .86 to .96. Furthermore, higher levels of perceived autobiographical memory coherence were found to be significantly correlated to lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms. The ANIQ-NL was determined to be a valid and reliable tool to measure narrative identity awareness and perceived narrative coherence. Future research could utilise the ANIQ-NL to further investigate the role of narrative identity in psychological well-being.
... Drawing on Neisser's research (1986Neisser's research ( , 1988Neisser's research ( , 1994, Berntsen and Rubin proposed an ecological theory of autobiographical memory, highlighting the "pervasive social function of human autobiographical memory" (Berntsen and Rubin, 2012). Seeing autobiographical memory as an event-simulator system (Rubin, 2012), this theory stresses that autobiographical memory also plays a key role in shaping representations of possible future events (D'Argembeau, 2012). ...
The flow of human thoughts is frequently plagued by unwanted cognitive activity, which has the unfortunate power to interfere with task performance, planning, social behaviour, and many other aspects of our lives. Importantly, repetitive negative thoughts and memories play a major role in psychopathology and represent a fundamental transdiagnostic process which deserves experimental and clinical attention. Inhibitory deficits on the one hand and metacognitive beliefs on the other are thought to play a key role in maintaining intrusive repetitive memories and thoughts in a variety of mental health difficulties (Major Depressive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder). This thesis argues against Daniel Wegner’s Ironic Process Theory (Chapter 1) and examines the impact of thought suppression on intrusive Autobiographical Memories with two studies: an fMRI study (Study 1, Chapter 2), and a behavioural study (Study 2, Chapter 3). These two studies represent the first attempt to employ the Autobiographical Think/No-Think task (ATNT), a novel version of the Think/No-Think task solely based on autobiographical memories provided by each participant. In particular, Study 1 investigates the neural correlates of the ATNT task using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and Study 2 explores the introduction of trial-by-trial intrusion ratings in the ATNT task and considers the affective consequences of thought suppression using Skin Conductance Response (SCR). This thesis also probes for the first time the relationship between metacognitive beliefs, intrusive memories, and thought control abilities using the standard Think/No-Think paradigm and manipulating participants’ metacognitive beliefs about the usefulness and the uncontrollability of repetitive intrusive thinking (Study 3, Chapter 4). After a general discussion (Chapter 5), this thesis reflects on the philosophical and ethical implications of forgetting, from a personal, psychological, and historical point of view (Chapter 6).
... 1. Analysis of the number of memories by age groups shows that the number of memories increases with age, which corresponds to the general psychological patterns of memory development, cognitive development of the formation of self-awareness, overcoming the phenomenon of childhood amnesia [4]. 2. It is statistically established that for any period of autobiographical memories, a negative background is interconnected with the following parameters: a decrease in activity, hostility experiences, the aggressiveness of the environment, the threat of rejection, loss of self-confidence, an oppressed state, the experience of being mistreated. ...
... In this context, our research group has recently begun to address this issue by examining autobiographical memory in individuals with MS. Autobiographical memory is by essence memory for real-life situations and is at the heart of what defines an individual as a person in society [12]. Autobiographical memories are important for social functioning (e.g. ...
Learning and memory impairments are common in individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) and have pervasive effects on everyday life functioning. Hence, memory and learning have received particular attention in the cognitive rehabilitation literature in MS. The effectiveness of memory rehabilitation on memory performance is supported by several studies, but the generalisability of the benefits to daily life and memory for real-life events has rarely been examined. Recently, a new line of research focusing on memory for personal life events (i.e., autobiographical memory) has emerged in the MS literature. This approach is complementary to classical learning
and memory paradigms and also allows for approaching memory in a broader context, one that considers memory as the ability to remember past episodes and imagine events that may occur in one's personal future (i.e. future thinking). This review provides an overview of the findings in this line of work. The first part summarises current evidence regarding the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying autobiographical memory and future thinking impairments in MS. It points out that these domains are frequently and early impaired in individuals with MS because of an executive/frontal-related deficit. Individuals with MS are generally aware of these deficits and their negative impact on everyday life, so the development of strategies to alleviate such deficits seems of paramount importance. Thus, in the second part, I present the main outcomes of a cognitive intervention
developed by our research group, which has been specifically designed to alleviate autobiographical memory and future thinking impairments in individuals with MS. The implications of these findings for neuropsychological care and well-being of individuals with MS are discussed in the final section, with an emphasis on the functional role of autobiographical memory and future thinking in various domains, including personal identity.
... The ability to remember our personal past is called autobiographical memory (for more contemporary review see Berntsen & Rubin, 2012; for clinical perspective see also, Watson & Bernsten, 2015). We use it every time when we want to recall something that we personally did or experienced in the past. ...
... This interaction is seminal for identity formation. To a large degree, the "I" is the sum of past experiences (Erfahrungen), which are stored in autobiographical memory [3]..But also semantic memory, i.e. the knowledge of what to expect and how to behave in specific situations [39],, depends crucially on this complexity. Experiences (as Erfahrungen) are the memorable and meaningful outcomes of experiencing (as Erleben), contributing to identity (e.g. in the form of autobiographical memory) and to learning about the world (which may become semantic memory). ...
... Autobiographical memory is an increasingly popular area of research (Berntsen & Rubin, 2012). One of its hallmarks, the reminiscence bump, is poorly understood. ...
The reminiscence bump is the disproportionate number of autobiographical memories dating from adolescence and early adulthood. It has often been ascribed to a consolidation of the mature self in the period covered by the bump. Here we stripped away factors relating to the characteristics of autobiographical memories per se, most notably factors that aid in their encoding or retention, by asking students to generate imagined word-cued and imagined 'most important' autobiographical memories of a hypothetical, prototypical 70-year-old of their own culture and gender. We compared the distribution of these fictional memories with the distributions of actual word-cued and most important autobiographical memories in a sample of 61-70-year-olds. We found a striking similarity between the temporal distributions of the imagined memories and the actual memories. These results suggest that the reminiscence bump is largely driven by constructive, schematic factors at retrieval, thereby challenging most existing theoretical accounts.
... Some scholars define autobiographical memories as memories for personally experienced specific events having personal significance (e.g.,Nelson, 1993). FollowingBerntsen and Rubin (2012), we prefer a broader definition concerning memory for experienced events, which in principle allows for considering autobiographical memories in both young children as well as in other species. ...
In a seminal study Simcock and Hayne (2002) showed that 3-year-olds were unable to use newly acquired words to describe a "magic" event experienced 6 or 12 months earlier. In the reference study the children's verbal recall was tested without props being present. Inspired by recent evidence, the original design was replicated, testing 33-and 39-month-olds (n = 180), but with props present at recall while controlling for potential online reasoning. The results revealed that the children did use newly acquired words to describe their preverbal memory. Thus, the present study shows that nonverbal memories can be verbalized if the recall setting provides a high level of contextual support, a finding relevant to researchers investigating the offset of childhood amnesia. (PsycINFO Database Record
... Autobiographical memory (AM) allows us to access memories about our own lives [116,117]. These include memories for facts, such as where we lived when we were five or which year we left school, and memories for episodes, like a first date or a nerve-wracking public performance . ...
Epilepsy is both a disease of the brain and the mind. Here, we present the first of two papers with extended summaries of selected presentations of the Third International Congress on Epilepsy, Brain and Mind (April 3-5, 2014; Brno, Czech Republic). Epilepsy in history and the arts and its relationships with religion were discussed, as were overviews of epilepsy and relevant aspects of social cognition, handedness, accelerated forgetting and autobiographical amnesia, and large-scale brain networks.
Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Inc.
... In contemporary psychology, autobiographical memories are defined as recollections of personally experienced past events (Addis, McIntosh, Moscovitch, Crawley, & McAndrews, 2004;Berntsen & Rubin, 2012;Daselaar et al., 2008;Nelson & Fivush, 2004;Smith, Souchay, & Conway, 2010;Williams et al., 2007). The focus on personal experiences leads naturally to the view that autobiographical memory (AM) is directly and centrally tied to conceptions of the self (e.g., Conway, Singer, & Tagini, 2008;Fivush & Haden, 2003;Prebble, Addis, & Tippett, 2013;Singer & Salovey, 1993;St. ...
... You are able to do everything you now do, but you remember nothing of your personal history: no name, no family, no friends, no recollection of where you have been or what you have done – or who has done what to you. It is a very impoverished you that would remain without recollection of your personal history; your answer to ''Who am I?'' would be weak (for recent research see, for example, Berntsen & Rubin, 2012). Given the importance of personal history for personal identity, it cannot be surprising that history is important also for group identity. ...
... This study provides evidence that people use a combination of culturally transmitted knowledge and knowledge based on personal experience (Berntsen & Rubin, 2012;Conway & Jobson, 2012;Fivush, Habermas, Waters & Zaman, 2011) to help organize their autobiographical memories chronologically. We found in this study that more than 60 years after the end of World War II in Europe, it still had a strong impact on the way that older participants navigated through their autobiographical memories. ...
This study examines predictions from two theories on the organisation of autobiographical memory: Cultural Life Script Theory which conceptualises the organisation of autobiographical memory by cultural schemata, and Transition Theory which proposes that people organise their memories in relation to personal events that changed the fabric of their daily lives, or in relation to negative collective public transitions, called the Living-in-History effect. Predictions from both theories were tested in forty-eight-old Germans from Berlin and Northern Germany. We tested whether the Living-in-History effect exists for both negative (the Second World War) and positive (Fall of Berlin Wall) collectively experienced events, and whether cultural life script events serve as a prominent strategy to date personal memories. Results showed a powerful, long-lasting Living-in History effect for the negative, but not the positive event. Berlin participants dated 26% of their memories in relation to the Second World War. Supporting cultural life script theory, life script events were frequently used to date personal memories. This provides evidence that people use a combination of culturally transmitted knowledge and knowledge based on personal experience to navigate through their autobiographical memories, and that experiencing war has a lasting impact on the organisation of autobiographical memories across the life span.
... While the coverage provides an excellent starting point, given theconsiderable current research activity on the topic of autobiographical memory, the comprehensiveness of the material here is somewhat limited. An excellent overview of contemporary views regarding naturalistic memory can be obtained by reading this book in conjuction with the recent volume by Berntsen and Rubin (2012). ...
... Instances of these external tangible cues can be completely personal and seemingly infinitely diverse, for example, a birthday gift from a close friend, a heirloom piece, a souvenir, the color of a fabric, or the traditional holiday photo album. This paper will be about personal memories, as in autobiographical and episodic memories (for an overview, see Berntsen & Rubin, 2012), which can be retrieved voluntarily and involuntarily (Berntsen, 2009). More specifically, the focus is on everyday memory recall, which we define as the remembering of autobiographical memories taking place in real life, in the real world, as opposed to remembering taking place in laboratory conditions. ...
This paper aims to put the memory cue in the spotlight. We show how memory cues are incorporated in the area of interaction design. The focus is on external memory cues – cues that exist outside the human mind but have an internal effect on memory reconstruction. Examples of external cues include people, environments, and things, where the latter are most relevant for the aim of this paper since these cues can be incorporated in designs. This paper makes a dual contribution to research: (1) it provides insights into how memory research informs the design of devices to facilitate personal memory recall; and (2) by taking a design perspective, it raises questions about memory cues as part of real-life remembering to inform psychological memory research. Since memory theory inspires design and both fields would benefit from collaboration, we would like these questions to be an inspiration for future memory research, in particular targeting external memory cues.
Autobiography has increasingly achieved access in literary and cultural scholarship bringing attention to the ways in which the self is perceived and (re)created in virtue of our memories. To investigate the interrelation between self and memory, this paper is engaged with the following questions: what do we mean by the self or himself (autos)? How memory is constituted in the self? How can the self be written into narrative? Can the self be explained by in terms of memory? By introducing the concept of the self on account of these questions, this paper hopes to show that self and memory are intertwined through the process of constructing stories we tell, share and/or conceal about ourselves and others. Within this ambit, this paper seeks to examine Malika Oufkir’s Freedom: The Story of My Second Life through the prism of exile, memory, and identity (re)construction. It investigates how this narrative navigates imprisonment, displacement and estrangement. Central to this analysis is the representation of memory as both a site of agony and a mechanism for resistance, through which Oufkir reclaims agency over her identity. In short, the paper also explores the intricate interplay between personal and political exile in the sense that it delves deep into how the author’s experiences reflect broader themes of imprisonment, displacement, fragmentation and estrangement in the postcolonial context. Drawing upon theories of autobiographical memory and collective identity, this paper examines how Oufkir’s narrative intertwines personal and collective histories, revealing the complex interplay between individual memories and broader socio-cultural contexts. In essence, this paper adopts an eclectic methodology to address the question of autobiographical construction of self and memory. As such, the paper focuses on the transformative role of exile in shaping Malika’s identity and memory. By situating Oufkir’s narrative within the framework of gendered resistance, this paper seeks to illustrate how she transcends the boundaries of imprisonment and exilic condition in order to reconstruct a sense of being and knowing in a place and time in a world that remains deeply fractured by cultural and historical divides. Eventually, the paper underscores Freedom as a powerful testament to the enduring struggle for selfhood in the face of dislocation and marginalization.
Research on event memory in early childhood is predominantly based on asking direct questions to the children. To respond to questions concerning past events, children will have to engage in strategic retrieval involving a deliberate and cognitively demanding search process. Hence, strategic retrieval has become a proxy for retrieval in general which is assumed to depend on the involvement of prefrontal cortex. However, spontaneous retrieval is an important, yet hitherto largely overlooked, alternative mode of retrieval that involves less cognitive effort. Spontaneous retrieval is based on simple associations often triggered by distinct cues in the context, and as such neither a result of questions asked nor of deliberate search strategies. Although most parents are likely to have experienced their children having spontaneous recollections, and even though involuntary memories—the ‘adult’ equivalent to spontaneous recall—have been studied extensively, surprisingly little is known from a scientific perspective about young children’s spontaneous memories. However, recently we have seen an upsurge in research on spontaneous memories in young children. We review recent evidence suggesting that (a) the same memories for past events can be accessed by different retrieval mechanisms, and (b) that spontaneous retrieval (in contrast to strategic) does not necessarily become less effective as we investigate younger individuals. These findings suggest that that spontaneous retrieval may be an ontogenetic forerunner of strategic retrieval of past events and thus an important component to a more complete understanding of the development of memory for past events.
This chapter reviews the main theoretical approaches to the content and organisation of autobiographical memory, namely which information forms our remembered pasts and how this information links up. To this end, the author pays special attention to the contributions made by those psychologists who, in the wake of the cognitive revolution, enquired in depth into the cognitive processes and knowledge structures (e.g. lifetime periods, general events, event-specific knowledge) capable of mentally representing the autobiographical past. Other topics addressed in this chapter include the emerging “life story” construct, the techniques used to analyse the narrative organisation of autobiographical memories, and the relationship between the “autobiographical memory” and “autobiographical narrative” concepts.
I propose a model that places episodic, semantic, and other commonly studied forms of memory into the same conceptual space. The space is defined by three dimensions required for Tulving’s episodic and semantic memory. An implicit–explicit dimension contrasts both episodic and semantic memory with common forms of implicit memory. A self-reference dimension contrasts episodes that occurred to one person with semantic knowledge. A scene dimension contrasts episodes that occurred in specific contexts with context-free semantic information. The three dimensions are evaluated against existing behavioral and neural evidence to evaluate both the model and the concepts underlying the study of human memory. Unlike a hierarchy, which has properties specific to each category, the dimensions have properties that extend throughout the conceptual space. Thus, the properties apply to all forms of existing and yet-to-be-discovered memory within the space. Empty locations in the proposed space are filled with existing phenomena that lack a clear place in current theories of memory, including reports of episodic-like memories for events reported to but not witnessed by a person, fictional narrative accounts, déjà vu, and implicit components contributing to personality, the self, and autobiographical memory.
Accurate pharmacoepidemiologic study conclusions require assessment of valid data, regardless of whether the data originate from questionnaires, administrative claims, or electronic health records. This chapter provides an overview of current methodologic concerns in validation studies, including types and detection of measurement error, effects of error on the point estimate of association, and correction options. Validity issues for diagnosis and medication data, and how the accuracy of these data varies by patient and other characteristics, are also discussed. Two examples are provided to illustrate validation efforts for questionnaires and electronic data: nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and myocardial infarction and NSAIDs and gastrointestinal bleeding. Current solutions include steps to consider when designing and analyzing validation studies using either questionnaire or electronic data. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the continued need for validation studies, especially as research moves toward incorporation of new data sources, increase in data linkage, and use of unstructured data for pharmacoepidemiology research.
This prospective longitudinal study traced changes and individual differences in childhood amnesia over adolescence. A sample of 58 adolescents were followed from age 1-1/2 to age 16 years across 8 timepoints. At ages 12 (n = 46) and 16 (n = 51), adolescents completed an early memory interview. Early childhood measures included children’s self-awareness, attachment security, nonverbal memory, verbal memory, language, theory of mind, narrative, and the early reminiscing environment (mothers’ elaborative reminiscing). Adolescents continued to forget their earliest memories over adolescence, such that the age of first memory increased from 40 to 52 months from ages 12 to 16. The sole unique contributor to individual differences in age of earliest memory at both 12 and 16 years was mothers’ elaborative reminiscing, with adolescents recalling earlier memories if their mothers had reminisced more elaboratively with them during early childhood. At age 16, the role of maternal reminiscing was moderated by self-awareness at age 1-1/2. Mothers’ elaborative reminiscing mattered for the age of adolescents’ earliest memories only for children who showed lower levels of self-awareness as toddlers. This pattern suggests a buffering effect for the role of maternal reminiscing in children’s earliest memories, and supports integrated theories of childhood amnesia.
People can mentally travel to the future to "prelive" events they might experience. This ability to mentally prelive future events is closely related to the ability to mentally relive past events. People report traveling back in time to relive experiences that happened in their past in order to direct their behavior in the present, so people may imagine future experiences for similar reasons. If people use imagined future experiences to direct their behavior, how do the characteristics of these directive future experiences compare with those of directive memories? To address that question, we asked subjects to describe either an imagined future event or a remembered event that had helped them when they thought of it. We then asked each subject to rate phenomenological and memorial characteristics of his or her event, including how vivid and emotionally evocative it was, how often he or she rehearsed it, and its emotional valence. We also classified each event according to its relationship with the cultural life script (CLS). Across two experiments, we found that directive future experiences were more evocative, more frequently rehearsed, more positive, and more often drawn from the CLS than directive memories. These results suggest that, although imagined future experiences may, like memories of past experiences, serve a directive function, the characteristics of these two classes of experience are distinct. We also found that many directive memories were negative, suggesting a special role for these memories in guiding behavior. The consequences of mental time travel on behavior warrant further study. (PsycINFO Database Record
We review research on life story chapters, defined as important extended time periods in individuals’ lives with identifiable beginnings and endings (e.g., “my marriage”). Studies show that individuals form chapters for the personal past and future, and for other people’s past and future lives (vicarious chapters). Research also indicates that emotional qualities of both past and future chapters are related to well-being, and that mentally constructing fewer and temporally less extended future chapters could underlie the sense of limited remaining time experienced by older adults. Qualities of vicarious life story chapters are related to characteristics of chapters in the individual’s own life, suggesting potentially important interactions between how individuals represent their own lives and how they represent close others’ lives. Life story chapters are more than an important part of autobiographical memory; they are centrally involved in time perspective, well-being, and social cognition.
This article combines cognitive psychological knowledge of identity and temporal perception with theories of literature and historiography. The main focus is how people receive and adopt written information about the past. I argue that in historiographical accounts, when detached events are translated as metaphors or narratives, the writing process is not only guided by a reason and epistemological structure, but also by an attraction to an emotional credibility. In other words, writing history is partly accomplished for the purpose of reconstructing a smooth and coherent temporal order, emerging from a hope to attain an affective confidence which overcomes the absolute alterity of the past. On the other hand, when receiving a written historical narrative, an emotional attunement, a sensation of a connection with the past, helps us to assimilate the substance of that particular history as part of our individual way to perceive temporality and interaction. If historiography is understood on the one hand as an act of articulating the writer's narrative identity with the vocabulary provided by the past events, and on the other hand as a cultural means to strengthen the reader's explanation how ‘meaningfulness’ can be framed from aimless chronological time, it would be possible to scrutinize not only the ‘politics of history’ but also the ‘culture of writing about the past.’
In adolescence, remembering the personal past and understanding what kind of person one is intertwine to form a story of one's life as the most extant, informative, and flexible form of self-representation. In adolescence, the striving for self-coherence translates into a quest for global coherence of the life story. We suggest that contextualizing is a fifth means for creating global coherence in life narratives besides the cultural concept of biography, temporal, causal-motivational, and thematic coherence. We present three kinds of contextualizing in life narratives, the temporal macrostructure, sociohistorical contextualizing of one's life, and hierarchical and linear segmenting of the text and life. These three forms of contextualizing in life narratives by their authors are complemented by three forms of contextual influences on life narratives analyzed by researchers, namely the historical, personal, and communicative situation in which they are recounted. Contextualizing is exemplified by the life narrative of a young migrant. Cf. the relate publication: Neşe Hatiboğlu Altunnar & Tilmann Habermas (2018). Life narratives are more other-centered, more negative, and less coherent in Turkey than in Germany: Comparing provincial-Turkish, metropolitan-Turkish, Turkish-German, and native German educated young adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2466. doi 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02466
Cognitive aging research documents reduced access to contextually specific episodic details in older adults, whereas access to semantic or other nonepisodic information is preserved or facilitated. The present study extended this finding to autobiographical memory by using a new measure; the Autobiographical Interview. Younger and older adults recalled events from 5 life periods. Protocols were scored according to a reliable system for categorizing episodic and nonepisodic information. Whereas younger adults were biased toward episodic details reflecting happenings, locations, perceptions, and thoughts, older adults favored semantic details not connected to a particular time and place. This pattern persisted after additional structured probing for contextual details. The Autobiographical Interview is a useful instrument for quantifying episodic and semantic contributions to personal remote memory.
The authors describe a model of autobiographical memory in which memories are transitory mental constructions within a self-memory system (SMS). The SMS contains an autobiographical knowledge base and current goals of the working self. Within the SMS, control processes modulate access to the knowledge base by successively shaping cues used to activate autobiographical memory knowledge structures and, in this way, form specific memories. The relation of the knowledge base to active goals is reciprocal, and the knowledge base “grounds” the goals of the working self. It is shown how this model can be used to draw together a wide range of diverse data from cognitive, social, developmental, personality, clinical, and neuropsychological autobiographical memory research.
People can time travel cognitively because they can remember events having occurred at particular times in the past (episodic memory) and because they can anticipate new events occurring at particular times in the future. The ability to assign points in time to events arises from human development of a sense of time and its accompanying time-keeping technology. The hypothesis is advanced that animals are cognitively stuck in time; that is, they have no sense of time and thus have no episodic memory or ability to anticipate long-range future events. Research on animals' abilities to detect time of day, track short time intervals, remember the order of a sequence of events, and anticipate future events are considered, and it is concluded that the stuck-in-time hypothesis is largely supported by the current evidence.
An experimental study examined whether autobiographical memory serves the function of maintaining
intimacy in romantic relationships. Young and older adults (N¼129) recalled either
autobiographical relationship events or fictional relationship vignettes. Intimacy (warmth, closeness)
was measured before and after remembering.Warmth was enhanced after recalling autobiographical
events irrespective of individuals’ age and gender; women also experienced gains in closeness. The
role of memory characteristics (quality and content) in producing changes in intimacy was also
examined. Personal significance of the autobiographical memory was the best predictor of warmth
and closeness in the relationship, though how frequently the memory was thought or talked about, and
how intimate the memory was also predicted levels of closeness, particularly for women. Results are
discussed in terms of how autobiographical memories can be used to foster intimacy in romantic
relationships across adulthood.
For word-cued autobiographical memories, older adults had an increase, or bump, from the ages 10 to 30. All age groups had fewer memories from childhood than from other years and a power-function retention function for memories from the most recent 10 years. There were no consistent differences in reaction times and rating scale responses across decades. Concrete words cued older memories, but no property of the cues predicted which memories would come from the bump. The 5 most important memories given by 20- and 35-year-old participants were distributed similarly to their word-cued memories, but those given by 70-year-old participants came mostly from the single 20-to-30 decade. No theory fully accounts for the bump.
Imagine that you are to tell your life story to a new friend, whom you have just met and who therefore does not know anything about your past. It is a friend with whom you are absolutely confident and with whom you can be completely honest. You want to tell him or her about the events from your own personal life that you think are most central to your life story. Which events would you include? There are probably many candidates, but some events are more likely to spring to mind than others. If you are like most people, you would be unlikely to include, for example, the day you read your first book, when you learned to write your own name, once your wallet was stolen, once you had a toothache and a root canal treatment, or the first time that you went on a plane trip. You would be more likely to tell your new friend about having siblings, beginning school, the first time you fell in love, some major achievement in sports or academics, when you left home, and when you graduated. You might also include your first job, marriage, the birth of your children or grandchildren, and so forth, if you are old enough to have experienced such events. How are these events selected over others? You may say that they are selected because they are important, much more important than learning to read a book. But then what do we mean by importance here?
The oldest direct evidence of stone tool manufacture comes from
Gona (Ethiopia) and dates to between 2.6 and 2.5 million years
(Myr) ago
1
. At the nearby Bouri site several cut-marked bones also
show stone tool use approximately 2.5 Myr ago
2
. Here we report
stone-tool-inflicted marks on bones found during recent survey
work in Dikika, Ethiopia, a research area close to Gona and
Bouri. On the basis of low-power microscopic and environmental
scanning electron microscope observations, these bones show unambiguous
stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion
marks for marrow access. The bones derive from the Sidi Hakoma
Member of the Hadar Formation. Established
40
Ar–
39
Ar dates on
the tuffs that bracket this member constrain the finds to between
3.42 and 3.24 Myrago, and stratigraphic scaling between these units
and other geological evidence indicate that they are older than
3.39 Myr ago. Our discovery extends by approximately 800,000
years the antiquity of stone tools and of stone-tool-assisted consumption
of ungulates by hominins; furthermore, this behaviour
can now be attributed to Australopithecus afarensis.
A national sample of adult Americans was asked to report "the national or world events or changes over the past 50 years" that seemed to them especially important, and then to explain the reasons for their choices. The resulting data are used both quantitatively and qualitatively to explore hypotheses related to generational effects, life course, and collective memory. Broadly speaking, different cohorts recall different events or changes, and these memories come especially from adolescence and early adulthood. The reasons for mentioning various events and changes also differ across cohorts in ways that indicate that generational effects are the result of the intersection of personal and national history.
Silence about the past permeates acts of remembering, with marked mnemonic consequences. Mnemonic silence-the absence of expressing a memory-is public in nature and is embedded within communicative acts, such as conversations. As such, silence has the potential to affect both speakers-the source of the silence-and listeners-those attending to the speaker. Although the topic of silence is widely discussed, it is rarely mentioned in the empirical literature on memory. Three factors are employed to classify silence into different types: whether a silence is accompanied by covert remembering, whether the silence is intentional or unintentional, and whether the silenced memory is related or unrelated to the memories emerging in a conversation. These factors appear to be critical when considering the mnemonic consequences. Moreover, the influence of silence on memory varies between speaker and listener. Although rarely mentioned, recent empirical research on memory clearly has a bearing on a topic of such general interest as silence.
© Association for Psychological Science 2012.
This article presents an evaluation of research strategy in the psychology of memory. To the extent that a strategy can be discerned, it appears less than optimal in several respects. It relates only weakly to subjective experience, it does not clearly differentiate between structure and strategy, and it is oriented more toward remembering which words were in a list than to the diverse functions that memory serves. This last limitation fosters assumptions about memory that are false: that encoding and retrieval are distinct modes of operation; that the effects of repetition, duration, and recency are interchangeable; and that memory is ahistorical. Theories that parsimoniously explain data from single tasks will never generalize to memory as a whole because their core assumptions are too limited. Instead, memory theory should be based on a broad variety of evidence. Using findings from several memory tasks and observations of everyday memory, I suggest some ways in which involuntary reminding plays a central role in cognition. The evolutionary purpose of memory may have been the construction and maintenance-through reminding-of a spatio-temporal model of the environment. I conclude by recommending ways in which efficiency of the field's research strategy might be improved.
© The Author(s) 2011.
There is currently a great deal of discussion in the humanities and social sciences about collective memory, but there is very little agreement on what it is. The first goal of this volume is to review various understandings of this term to bring some coherence to the discussion. Drawing on this review, James V. Wertsch goes on to outline a particular version of collective remembering grounded in the use of 'textual resources', especially narratives. This takes him into the special properties of narrative that shape this process and into the issues of how these textual resources are produced and consumed. Wertsch brings these general ideas to life by examining the rapid, massive transformation of collective memory during the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet Russia.
Roger Schank's influential book, Dynamic Memory, described how computers could learn based upon what was known about how people learn. Since that book's publication in 1982, Dr Schank has turned his focus from artificial intelligence to human intelligence. Dynamic Memory Revisited contains the theory of learning presented in the original book, extending it to provide principles for teaching and learning. It includes Dr Schank's important theory of case-based reasoning and assesses the role of stories in human memory. In addition, it covers his ideas on non-conscious learning, indexing, and the cognitive structures that underlie learning by doing. Dynamic Memory Revisited is crucial reading for all who are concerned with education and school reform. It draws attention to how effective learning takes place and provides instruction for developing software that truly helps students learn.
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 integrates the best contemporary work on the cognitive psychology of autobiographical memory. Introductory chapters place the study of autobiographical memory in its historical, methodological, and theoretical contexts; chapters reporting original research probe the recollections people have for substantial portions of their lives. Topics include the schematic and temporal organization of autobiographical memory, the temporal distribution of autobiographical memories, and the failures of autobiographical memory in various forms of amnesia. Autobiographical Memory constitutes the first tutorial in this exciting new area of research. Cognitive psychologists, clinicians, researchers in artificial intelligence, and their students - indeed, anyone interested in the processes that preserve and distort autobiography - will find it a useful resource.
Provides a firm theoretical grounding for the increasing movement of cognitive psychologists, neuropsychologists and their students beyond the laboratory, in an attempt to understand human cognitive abilities as they are manifested in natural contexts. The pros and cons of the laboratory and the real world - the problems of generalizability versus rigor - are thoroughly analyzed, and practical escapes from what has become a false dichotomy are suggested. The authors present relevant data that open up new directions for those studying cognitive aging. Finally, they consider the applications of the new knowledge for clinicians and educators.
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 integrates the best contemporary work on the cognitive psychology of autobiographical memory. Introductory chapters place the study of autobiographical memory in its historical, methodological, and theoretical contexts; chapters reporting original research probe the recollections people have for substantial portions of their lives. Topics include the schematic and temporal organization of autobiographical memory, the temporal distribution of autobiographical memories, and the failures of autobiographical memory in various forms of amnesia. Autobiographical Memory constitutes the first tutorial in this exciting new area of research. Cognitive psychologists, clinicians, researchers in artificial intelligence, and their students - indeed, anyone interested in the processes that preserve and distort autobiography - will find it a useful resource.
The recent attempt to move research in cognitive psychology out of the laboratory makes autobiographical memory appealing, because naturalistic studies can be done while maintaining empirical rigor. Many practical problems fall into the category of autobiographical memory, such as eyewitness testimony, survey research, and clinical syndromes in which there are distortions of memory. Its scope extends beyond psychology into law, medicine, sociology, and literature. Work on autobiographical memory has matured since David Rubin's Autobiographical Memory appeared in 1986, and the timing is right for a new overview of the topic. Remembering our Past presents innovative research chapters and general reviews, covering such topics as emotions, eyewitness memory, false memory syndrome, and amnesia. The volume will appeal to graduate students and researchers in cognitive science and psychology.
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 integrates the best contemporary work on the cognitive psychology of autobiographical memory. Introductory chapters place the study of autobiographical memory in its historical, methodological, and theoretical contexts; chapters reporting original research probe the recollections people have for substantial portions of their lives. Topics include the schematic and temporal organization of autobiographical memory, the temporal distribution of autobiographical memories, and the failures of autobiographical memory in various forms of amnesia. Autobiographical Memory constitutes the first tutorial in this exciting new area of research. Cognitive psychologists, clinicians, researchers in artificial intelligence, and their students - indeed, anyone interested in the processes that preserve and distort autobiography - will find it a useful resource.
Introduction
Autobiographical memory is a topic that inherently involves a lifespan approach. The development of autobiographical memory in the individual raises issues starting with childhood amnesia and progressing to reminiscence and life review. This chapter analyzes the results of studies from several different laboratories. Together, these studies cover the adult lifespan. In all cases, the data are the dates of autobiographical memories that have been cued by words. In all cases, the dependent measure is the distribution of the memories across the individual's lifespan.
The structure of the chapter is as follows. First, the cuing method used to elicit memories is described. Next, the data obtained with college students are examined in terms of a laboratory retention function. Possible extentions of this retention function to older subjects are then considered before existing studies that use subjects of various ages are reviewed. Reanalysis of the data from these studies suggests that sampling as well as retention determines the relative accessibility of autobiographical memories of older subjects. Individuals begin to reminisce when they reach middle age; they recall a disproportionate number of memories from their early lives. These findings, which are consistent over several studies, lead to a model of autobiographical memory involving three components: retention, reminiscence, and childhood amnesia.
The recent attempt to move research in cognitive psychology out of the laboratory makes autobiographical memory appealing, because naturalistic studies can be done while maintaining empirical rigor. Many practical problems fall into the category of autobiographical memory, such as eyewitness testimony, survey research, and clinical syndromes in which there are distortions of memory. Its scope extends beyond psychology into law, medicine, sociology, and literature. Work on autobiographical memory has matured since David Rubin's Autobiographical Memory appeared in 1986, and the timing is right for a new overview of the topic. Remembering our Past presents innovative research chapters and general reviews, covering such topics as emotions, eyewitness memory, false memory syndrome, and amnesia. The volume will appeal to graduate students and researchers in cognitive science and psychology.
Recollections of unexpected and emotional events (called 'flashbulb' memories) have long been the subject of theoretical speculation. Previous meetings have brought together everyone who has done research on memories of the Challenger explosion, in order to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of flashbulb memories. How do flashbulb memories compare with other kinds of recollections? Are they unusually accurate, or especially long-lived? Do they reflect the activity of a special mechanism, as has been suggested? Although Affect and Accuracy in Recall focuses on flashbulb memories, it addresses more general issues of affect and accuracy. Do emotion and arousal strengthen memory? If so, under what conditions? By what physiological mechanisms? This 1993 volume is evidence of progress made in memory research since Brown and Kulick's 1977 paper.
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 integrates the best contemporary work on the cognitive psychology of autobiographical memory. Introductory chapters place the study of autobiographical memory in its historical, methodological, and theoretical contexts; chapters reporting original research probe the recollections people have for substantial portions of their lives. Topics include the schematic and temporal organization of autobiographical memory, the temporal distribution of autobiographical memories, and the failures of autobiographical memory in various forms of amnesia. Autobiographical Memory constitutes the first tutorial in this exciting new area of research. Cognitive psychologists, clinicians, researchers in artificial intelligence, and their students - indeed, anyone interested in the processes that preserve and distort autobiography - will find it a useful resource.
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 integrates the best contemporary work on the cognitive psychology of autobiographical memory. Introductory chapters place the study of autobiographical memory in its historical, methodological, and theoretical contexts; chapters reporting original research probe the recollections people have for substantial portions of their lives. Topics include the schematic and temporal organization of autobiographical memory, the temporal distribution of autobiographical memories, and the failures of autobiographical memory in various forms of amnesia. Autobiographical Memory constitutes the first tutorial in this exciting new area of research. Cognitive psychologists, clinicians, researchers in artificial intelligence, and their students - indeed, anyone interested in the processes that preserve and distort autobiography - will find it a useful resource.
The need to establish a narrative self reaches an important peak during adolescence as teens work to understand life events and establish their self-identity. The first book to examine narrative development during adolescence in depth, Narrative Development in Adolescence: Creating the Storied Self, focuses on both stable and at-risk youth as they construct, organize, and tell their life stories and link these stories to larger developmental contexts as they grow to maturity.
Renowned specialists identify such core skills as reflection, meaning making, and decision making as well as crucial domains, including autonomy and moral agency evolving across normative adolescence, and relate them to the narrative process. Deficits in these key areas are seen in the more contradictory and incoherent stories narrated by delinquent youth, teenage mothers, and victims of war and violence. In addition, these themes are observed as adolescents process and interpret the narratives of others.
This volume offers insights into the crucial task of identity development, and explores new possibilities for counseling and therapy. Its authoritative and accessible coverage:
• Examines the relationships between narrative and developmental outcomes
• Identifies normative and problematic issues in adolescents across cultures and social backgrounds in the United States, Canada, Germany, the former Yugoslavia, and New Zealand
• Offers current research on adolescent narrative development, with attention to theoretical bases and methodological issues
• Discusses the roles of parents, grandparents, and peers in shaping narratives
• Features case studies of narratives from at-risk youth
• Includes findings on how early narrative development predicts narrative identifying adolescence
Narrative Development in Adolescence is an essential resource for researchers, clinicians, and graduate students in developmental, clinical child, and school psychology as well as allied mental health and education fields. It is a must-have volume for anyone conducting research or working with adolescents to ensure their healthy development and successful transition to adulthood.
The basic laboratory technique for studying distinctiveness effect in memory is the isolation paradigm, a simple test in which a list of items is presented for memorization. All items except one are similar in some way. The different item always occurs late in the list, to allow the similarity of the preceding items to establish a context. Subsequent memory for the different item is always better than for the similar items. In 1948, Jenkins and Postman offered the intuitive-differential attention explanation to account for this difference in memory, that an item is remembered because it catches the subject's attention by violating the established context, so leads the subject to devote additional processing to it. It is this additional processing that accounts for enhanced memory. Since 1948, succeeding theories have accepted and perpetuated their explanation. In fact, the isolation effect and the intuitive explanation have applied to most other memory phenomena that fall under the rubric of bizarreness, salience, and novelty. The contributors to this volume argue that the intuitive-differential attention explanation and theories following from it are incorrect. The purpose of the volume is to test these currently accepted theories by contrasting them with the results of current research on the processes supporting them. The result is a much needed restructuring of the theories.
Silence lies between forgetting and remembering. This book explores how different societies have constructed silences to enable men and women to survive and make sense of the catastrophic consequences of armed conflict. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, it examines the silences that have followed violence in twentieth-century Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These essays show that silence is a powerful language of remembrance and commemoration and a cultural practice with its own rules. This broad-ranging book discloses the universality of silence in the ways we think about war through examples ranging from the Spanish Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Armenian Genocide and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Bringing together scholarship on varied practices in different cultures, this book breaks new ground in the vast literature on memory, and opens up new avenues of reflection and research on the lingering aftermath of war.
Personal histories are a primary form of organization in autobiographical memory. They organize temporally distributed experience into thematically-related “streams”. First experience stories are a useful source for identifying the kinds of histories commonly constructed in our society. Two types of histories are examined: histories of skill development and relationship histories. The primary function of first experience memories is structural: they organize histories into distinctive units and establish their causaltemporal sequence. First experiences are also utilized in retrospective and prospective evaluations of self and experience. Some histories are more culturally salient than others. Memories of firsts associated with those histories can indicate the extent to which personal meaning is derived from cultural models, and whether that is a deforming or informing influence. Study of personal histories can provide useful clues about the respective contributions of memory and narrative in organizing experience.
Over 100 years ago, Frances Galton began the empirical study of autobiographical memory by devising a technique in which he explored the capacity for a cue word to elicit the recollection of events from earlier life (Galton, 1883). After a century of neglect, the topic began to re-emerge, stimulated by the work of Robinson (1976) using the technique on groups of normal subjects, by Crovitz’s work on its application to patients with memory deficits (Crovitz & Schiffman, 1974), and by the detailed diary study of her own autobiographical memory carried out by Marigold Linton (Linton, 1975). This early wave of interest was focused by Rubin’s edited book on the topic (Rubin, 1986) which captured a broad and growing interest in autobiographical memory. This trend was reflected very strongly in the submissions to the second conference on Practical Aspects of Memory, in which the study of autobiographical memory represented one of the major strands (Gruneberg, Morris & Sykes, 1988), featuring prominently in both the opening and concluding addresses (Baddeley, 1988; Neisser, 1988).
This chapter presents an overview of the concepts of representation in cognitive psychology and developmental psychology It then discusses theories based on levels of representation and their development in childhood The chapter begins with the function of representation in human cognition as conceptualized by cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist George Miller, who declared that language serves the representational function for humans that is otherwise served for non-language creatures But it leaves open the question of how-if at all-representation is managed by nonhumans or by nonlanguage using humans, such as pre-linguistic infants and very young children These questions reflect contentious issues in cognitive science based on different computational models of symbolic processing and neural network processing Specific alleged domains such as space, number, object knowledge, and theory of mind are integrated in the knowledge structures of the early years and serve as background to the pragmatics of everyday life, organized in terms of domains of practice © 2006 by Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I.M. Craik. All rights reserved.
Characterizing and evaluating other social groups is a primary issue in verbal interactions within adolescent peer-groups. By stylizing others, the peer-group gains its own identity ex negativo. The paper analyzes instances of naturally occurring peer-group interactions. It is argued that the default-orientation towards interactional competition and entertainment which is distinctive for adolescents’ peer-group interactions leads to a preference of stereotypical representations of the Other. By distancing themselves from the Others, the peer-group creates highly involving and entertaining interactive events which strengthen consensus and emotional cohesion among the group-members. While the practice of stereotyping others tacitly reproduces common moral standards, it simultaneously avoids to impose them explicitly on the individual member. Convening on what we are not and what we do not want to be by stereotyping the concept of Others thus can be seen as a solution for the problem to reconcile the need for a common group-identity and shared normative expectancies combined with the need for individual freedom.
The results of functional neuroimaging studies of autobiographical memory can inform our understanding of the neural correlates of recollection in several ways. First, autobiographical memory typically involves an integration of episodic and semantic memories, and thus, the extent of recollection during autobiographical memory retrieval varies depending on the relative contribution of these two forms of memory. Second, autobiographical memory construction involves a protracted retrieval time that allows for the examination of the multiple retrieval processes mediating recollection. Third, properties that might modulate recollection processes, such as emotion, vividness, and remoteness are more easily examined at the upper boundary in autobiographical memory. This chapter focuses on these three domains where functional neuroimaging studies of autobiographical memory can make unique contributions to our understanding of the complex nature of recollection. Before turning to these domains, the main functional neuroimaging methods for investigating autobiographical memory are first reviewed, which differ primarily in their ability to elicit recollection.
This book is the magnum opus of one of the most influential cognitive psychologists of the past 50 years. This new volume on the model he created (with Graham Hitch) discusses the developments that have occurred in the past 20 years, and places it within a broader context. Working memory is a temporary storage system that underpins onex' capacity for coherent thought. Some 30 years ago, Baddeley and Hitch proposed a way of thinking about working memory that has proved to be both valuable and influential in its application to practical problems. This book updates the theory, discussing both the evidence in its favour, and alternative approaches. In addition, it discusses the implications of the model for understanding social and emotional behaviour, concluding with an attempt to place working memory in a broader biological and philosophical context. Inside are chapters on the phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, the central executive and the episodic buffer. There are also chapters on the relevance to working memory of studies of the recency effect, of work based on individual differences, and of neuroimaging research. The broader implications of the concept of working memory are discussed in the chapters on social psychology, anxiety, depression, consciousness, and on the control of action. Finally, the author discusses the relevance of a concept of working memory to the classic problems of consciousness and free will.
The recent attempt to move research in cognitive psychology out of the laboratory makes autobiographical memory appealing, because naturalistic studies can be done while maintaining empirical rigor. Many practical problems fall into the category of autobiographical memory, such as eyewitness testimony, survey research, and clinical syndromes in which there are distortions of memory. Its scope extends beyond psychology into law, medicine, sociology, and literature. Work on autobiographical memory has matured since David Rubin's Autobiographical Memory appeared in 1986, and the timing is right for a new overview of the topic. Remembering our Past presents innovative research chapters and general reviews, covering such topics as emotions, eyewitness memory, false memory syndrome, and amnesia. The volume will appeal to graduate students and researchers in cognitive science and psychology.
Narratives play no small part when people attempt to recollect certain events, experiences, and memories regarding their past, since such would enable them to give their own accounts regarding any aspect or point of time in their life, be it a specific event or their entire life story. This chapter attempts to look into how narratives are able to facilitate such recollections, through providing an outline of the processes involved in recollection and by looking into how these cognitive processes undergo certain disturbances that are brought about by neural damage and its effects. To further understand the mechanisms that underlie such processes, this chapter explores certain essential behavioral data such as explicit memory, imagery, language, narrative reasoning, and neuropsychological data such as the various losses encountered in explicitmemory and in other systems.
The chapter tackles the placement of self-reflective consciousness amongst the numberless gradations by Darwin. Discussions of self-consciousness inevitably lead to Descartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am". The goal is a rapprochement between this view and the Cartesian view, emphasizing this kind of consciousness applicable only to humans. Descartes maintained that animals are unable to engage in self-reflection. Negative results of various ape language projects and broad advances in animal cognition suggest that Descartes was right about the uniqueness of language but that he was wrong about animal's capacity for thought and self-reflection. There is abundant evidence that nonhuman pirates can form representations and use them to solve problems. The concept of autonoetic consciousness, as Tulving calls it, seemed close to the construct of self-reflective consciousness and metacognition which was the concern. Thus, instead of focusing on language, more fundamental capabilities are considered-the origins of self-reflective consciousness.
I: Three Classes of TheoriesII: Empirical FindingsIII: An Ecological Approach to Involuntary Autobiographical MemoriesAcknowledgementsReferences
This article examines the effects of memory loss on a patient's ability to remember the past and imagine the future. We present the case of D.B., who, as a result of hypoxic brain damage, suffered severe amnesia for the personally experienced past. By contrast, his knowledge of the nonpersonal past was relatively preserved. A similar pattern was evidenced in his ability to anticipate future events. Although D.B. had great difficulty imagining what his experiences might be like in the future, his capacity to anticipate issues and events in the public domain was comparable to that of neurologically healthy, age-matched controls. These findings suggest that neuropsychological dissociations between episodic and semantic memory for the past also may extend to the ability to anticipate the future.
Storytelling about childhood experiences by parents was examined during the early stages of parenthood. Ninety-one husbands and 97 wives whose oldest child was either 1 year old or less or between 2 and 4 years of age were interviewed about the frequency and type of stories about their own childhoods they told to their own children. Such storytelling was common for the whole sample, with 96% talking about their childhood at least occasionally. Fathers told stories with stronger achievement themes, and mothers told stories with stronger affiliation themes. Parents of infants were more likely to tell stories with affiliative themes, and parents of preschool children were more likely to tell stories with achievement themes.
The authors investigated trends in probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) prevalence in the general population of New York City in the first 6 months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Three random digit dialing telephone surveys of adults in progressively larger portions of the New York City metropolitan area were conducted 1 month, 4 months, and 6 months after September 11, 2001. A total of 1,008, 2,001, and 2,752 demographically representative adults were recruited in the three surveys, respectively. The current prevalence of probable PTSD related to the September 11 attacks in Manhattan declined from 7.5% (95% confidence interval: 5.7, 9.3) 1 month after September 11 to 0.6% (95% confidence interval: 0.3, 0.9) 6 months after September 11. Although the prevalence of PTSD symptoms was consistently higher among persons who were more directly affected by the attacks, a substantial number of persons who were not directly affected by the attacks also met criteria for probable PTSD. These data suggest a rapid resolution of most of the probable PTSD symptoms in the general population of New York City in the first 6 months after the attacks. The psychological consequences of a large-scale disaster in a densely populated urban area may extend beyond persons directly affected by the disaster to persons in the general population.
It has often been assumed that memory depends upon the total action of the brain rather than upon some specialized intracerebral neuron mechanism. There is recent evidence, however, in support of the view that the recording of experience is localizable in the same sense that sensory functions and speech functions are localizable. Obviously, none of these subdivisions is separable from the work of the brain as a whole.
The following study shows that the capacity to record the daily current of conscious experience may be lost when there is bilateral destruction of a man's hippocampus and hippocampal gyrus. Functional paralysis of this recording mechanism does not, however, interfere with the patient's intellectual performance in other psychological tests not dependent on recent memory. Skills, language, and all those things which have already been learned are not lost.
This inability to record new experience is not found in cases of strictly unilateral
Introduction
SYSTEMATIC study of first memories and their relationship to personality has been of considerable interest. Such data permit psychodynamic conceptualization while lending themselves to quantitative methods, testable hypotheses, and correlative studies with clinical and other material. Several experimental techniques have been reported for such endeavors and preliminary results, notably those of Levy and Grigg6 and myself and my co-workers,5 have been favorable. These, and other past studies (see reference 5, where they are reviewed), have demonstrated the validity of earliest memories as reflectors of personality. All, however, utilized essentially post hoc techniques; the challenge of predictive research remained. The present study describes an effort to meet this challenge by attempting to predict from first memory content the personality features of a group of 48 subjects. Secondarily, it offers additional related data obtained by means of a post hoc analysis
In this study we describe a patient, GA, who developed an amnesic-confabulatory syndrome, following a subarachnoid haemorrhage and ischaemia due to rupture of the anterior communicating artery and subsequent vasospasm. As far as the performance on memory tasks was concerned, GA's confabulation was found to be restricted to the autobiographical aspect of episodic memory. Confabulation did not manifest itself in episodic learning tasks nor on tasks tapping various kinds of semantic knowledge. In contrast, GA confabulated in orientation in time and place tasks and also in tasks where she was required to plan her personal future. GA's confabulation could not be accounted for in terms of an impairment of strategic retrieval or of reality monitoring processes. It is suggested that GA's confabulation reflects a pathological awareness of personal temporality.
Recent research shows that adults engage children in a process of “co-constructing” memories by guiding them in the production of verbal accounts of their experiences. Such talk about past events may influence the development of autobiographical memory by teaching children that memories of personal experiences are valued, and further, which aspects of experience are considered memorable. It has been suggested that cultures may differ in the amount and content of these interactions. Sixteen mother and 3-year-old dyads (8 Korean and 8 Caucasian) were tape-recorded during naturally occurring conversations. The Caucasian dyads engaged in talk about past events nearly three times as often as the Korean dyads. This difference, as well as content differences in the talk, are discussed in light of socialization goals. Combined with previous research showing that Caucasian adults report earlier childhood memories than Asians, these findings support the theory that early linguistic experience may be related to the development of autobiographical memory.
Behavior, neuropsychology, and neuroimaging suggest that episodic memories are constructed from interactions among the following basic systems: vision, audition, olfaction, other senses, spatial imagery, language, emotion, narrative, motor output, explicit memory, and search and retrieval. Each system has its own well-documented functions, neural substrates, processes, structures, and kinds of schemata. However, the systems have not been considered as interacting components of episodic memory, as is proposed here. Autobiographical memory and oral traditions are used to demonstrate the usefulness of the basic-systems model in accounting for existing data and predicting novel findings, and to argue that the model, or one similar to it, is the only way to understand episodic memory for complex stimuli routinely encountered outside the laboratory.
© 2006 Association for Psychological Science.