Niels Peter Nielsen’s research while affiliated with Aarhus University and other places

General Audience Summary When people encounter new information, it can be made easier to understand by an accompanying cocktail of words, gestures, and behaviors. The problem is this same cocktail—called semantic context—can also create the illusion of understanding. Take, for example, foreign films and television series. Subtitles help viewers understand what characters are saying and what is happening. What is interesting is that viewers attend to subtitles effortlessly and may even lose awareness of the subtitles despite still relying on the subtitled information. But could subtitles create a semantic context that encourages viewers to be more confident they had learned the foreign language even when they had not? To answer this question, we conducted five experiments in which we showed participants a video clip of people speaking Danish—either with or without subtitles—and asked everyone to rate their ability to understand Danish in new situations. Then we asked people to translate Danish audio clips to see if they had learned any Danish. We found those who saw the subtitled video were more confident in their ability to understand Danish in new situations compared to those who saw the unsubtitled clips, even though they were not able to translate any more of the Danish audio clips. These findings suggest that relative to situations of lesser semantic context, greater semantic context can create illusions of one’s ability to do something implausible.

Obtaining eyewitness accounts after an event can aid criminal investigations. Mental Reinstatement of Context (MRC) is used to improve memory. However, direct comparisons have identified little effects of MRC relative to free delivery with No‐MRC, and little is known about the effects of MRC on subjective memory characteristics and the role of individual differences in autobiographical memory. Here we exposed 234 participants to a naturalistic film and randomly assigned them to either MRC or No‐MRC before requesting written memory reports and memory characteristics ratings. They also answered an autobiographical memory test. MRC participants reported more unverifiable, but not more accurate, details in Free Recall, whereas they performed better in Cued Recall and delivered higher ratings of Reliving, Vividness, Re‐experience, and Emotions, suggesting a richer recall experience, while Belief/confidence and Scene ratings did not differ. Individual differences in autobiographical memory correlated with memory characteristics but not with accuracy performances.

Narrative identity refers to a person's internalized and evolving life story. It is a rapidly growing research field, motivated by studies showing a unique association with well-being. Here we show that this association disappears when controlling for the emotional valence of the stories told and individuals' general experience of autobiographical memory. Participants (N = 235) wrote their life story and completed questionnaires on their general experience of autobiographical memory and several dimensions of well-being and affect. Participants' life stories were coded for standard narrative identity variables, including agency and communion. When controlling for emotional valence of the life story, the general experience of autobiographical memory was a significant predictor of most well-being measures, whereas agency was a predictor of one variable only and communion of none. These findings contradict the claim of an incremental association between narrative identity and well-being, and have important theoretical and practical implications for narrative identity as an outcome measure in interventions.

Individual differences in autobiographical memory have become an area of growing research interest. Recently, the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART; Berntsen et al., 2019 Berntsen, D., Hoyle, R. H., & Rubin, D. C. (2019). The Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART): A measure of individual differences in autobiographical memory. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 8(3), 305–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2019.06.005[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) was introduced. The ART measures individual differences in autobiographical memory along seven components: Vividness, narrative coherence, reliving, rehearsal, scene, visual imagery, and life story relevance. The ART is a useful and easily administered tool, but is so far not available in any of the Nordic languages. The aim of the present study was to provide a Danish translation of the ART and to provide correlations between the Danish ART and characteristics of randomly sampled memories (i.e. memories cued by words) in order to support the validity of the translation. First, the ART was translated into Danish. Then, 122 Danish adults filled out the Danish ART and rated the recollective qualities of three word cued autobiographical memories. The internal consistency was in line with findings on the original English version of the scale as were correlations between the Danish ART, Brief ART and the seven components of the ART. The Danish ART correlated positively with characteristics of the word cued memories corresponding to the seven components of the ART. Additional analyses demonstrated that the magnitude of these correlations were similar to those between ratings of individual memory items, supporting the validity of the ART as a trait-like measure of the recollective experience of autobiographical memory. The ART could be of interest to many areas of psychology and potential applications of the ART are discussed.

General Audience Summary People differ in their way of remembering personal past events. Some have very vivid memories, filled with details and a high sense of reliving, whereas others have vague and clouded memories. Such individual differences in the recollective experience of the personal past have been little studied. However, recently, a standardized test of such differences, the autobiographical recollection test (ART), was introduced. The ART addresses how people generally experience their memories (such as their perceived vividness and coherence), and not how accurately they remember past events. Still, it might seem likely that a person with very clear and detailed memories of the personal past also would have more accurate recollections. In the present studies, we investigated the relationship between the ART, objective accuracy, and participants’ confidence in their memory report. One challenge in doing so is the need for an objectively verifiable event. To meet this need, we used simulated, computer-generated events resembling real-life events, which allowed us to control the veridicality of the reported memories. In addition, we asked the participants to rate their level of confidence in their memory report, as memory confidence is often used to assess the reliability of an eyewitness report in the case of missing objective data. Across three studies, we found that the ART was unrelated to the objective accuracy of the memory of a simulated event. However, it was related to ratings of memory confidence, indicating that how confident a person feels in the memory recall of a specific event is partly a product of the persons’ general intuition about their memory. These findings have importance for research on eyewitness memory, where the general recollective experience has been little studied. Our findings suggest that it is informative to consider individual differences in the recollective experience of the personal past in general when investigating memory confidence.

Memory for traumatic events and their most distressing moments (hotspots) are typically examined in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using retrospective memory reports for the index trauma. Effects of PTSD symptoms on memory for new (post‐trauma) events and their hotspots have received less attention. Here we used a prospective, experimental design to address this question. Participants completed measures of PTSD symptoms, were exposed to either an emotional (N = 54) or a neutral (N = 44) simulated event, reported hotspots, and rated them on memory characteristics. After a 1‐year delay, participants once again reported hotspots and rated their memory characteristics. PTSD symptoms obtained before the event predicted emotional intensity, bodily reaction, and distress associated with hotspots from the event after a 1‐year delay, irrespective of event type. This suggests that memory for events in general and not just memory of the index trauma is affected by PTSD symptoms.

General Audience Summary Autobiographical memory is the kind of memory that allows us to remember events in our personal past. People often claim their memory for their past is better or worse than the one of others. Some seem to remember their past vividly and as coherent stories, while for others, memories of their personal past may seem vague and fragmented. Until recently, the field was lacking a viable and easily administered tool for studying such individual differences. To meet this need, the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART) was introduced as a test of individual differences in the subjective experience of autobiographical memory. The ART has been shown to have good psychometric properties and thus is a reliable test of how people generally remember their past—for example, whether they generally consider their memories to be vivid and detailed. However, it remained to be tested if scores on the ART predict how people remember specific events from their past. In three studies, we examined this question by having participants complete the ART and rate characteristics of several specific memories from their past. We found a consistent association between scores on the ART and the characteristics of specific memories, even after a 1-week delay. The findings establish the validity of the ART and demonstrate the scale as a reliable indicator of how people experience their autobiographical memories. Because the ART is a valid, robust, and easily administered test of individual differences in autobiographical memory, it can help to integrate autobiographical memory research with fields generally concerned with measuring stable tendencies and preferences, such as personality, educational, and clinical psychology.

The Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART; Berntsen et al., 2019) measures individual differences in autobiographical memory. We here examined whether the ART correlates with characteristics of people’s specific autobiographical memories. Participants (Ns ≥ 475) completed the ART and rated recollective qualities of autobiographical memories cued by words (Study 1), by positive and negative emotional valence (Study 2), and by future and past temporal direction (Study 3). Scores on the ART consistently correlated with recollective qualities of specific memories and future thoughts, both immediately and after a 1-week delay. The magnitude of these correlations was at the same level as the correlations between individual memory items, underscoring the ability of the ART, as a trait measure to predict ratings of individual memories. The findings support the construct validity of the ART and demonstrate that people’s evaluation of their autobiographical memory, in general, is reliably related to how they remember specific events.