AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

• The “ecological movement”– Neisser’s call:

• Cognition and Reality (1976)

• Memory Observed (1982)

– Banaji & Crowder (1989): Everyday memory is bankrupt• Low generalizability?

• Lack of control

• No new “principles”

– “Applied” studies of memory continue to be popular• Flashbulb memories

• Prospective memory

• Eyewitness testimony

• Traumatic amnesia

• Mnemonic techniques; expertise

• Autobiographical memory

Memory for One’s Life Story:Content and Process

• Biography and Culture– Biography as historical record– Biography as narrative– The “oral history” movement

• AM as a social activity– Building and sharing our “life story”

• Allende’s Paula (1995)

– Socializing, bonding and constructing the “self” through recounting our story• Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1922)

– The importance of cues

– Ecphory of the past and present

• Memory is life: Rachel the Replicant

– The importance of reminiscence among the elderly• Bluck: In search of wisdom

– The adaptive functions of AM: fight, flight or flirt?

METHODS OF TESTINGAUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

• Cuing methods– Free recall (and problem of clustering)– Cued recall

• By word or phrase (Galton 1879; Crovitz 1974)

• By date

• By “life period”

– Recognition (and issue of distractors)

• How to verify memory?– Experimenters keeping diaries

• Linton (75), Wagenaar (86): record events and contexts

– Subjects keeping diaries• Brewer (88): random “moments”

– Interviews with family members– Repeated testing of individuals

STRUCTURE AND PROCESS IN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

• The forgetting function for AM– Strong recency effect– Quasilinear or power function?

• Crovitz & Schiffman, 1974• Wagenaar, 1986

– Content and cuing variables• Salience and emotionality• Number and type of cues

Data from Wagenaar, 1986– Deviations from the curve

• Infantile amnesia and its causes• The “reminiscence bump” 15-25 yrs

• Content of AM– AM as composite of episodic

(spatiotemporal context) and semantic (personal and factual) information

– EM as fleeting, unless “linked” to AM knowledge and context (Conway, 00)• EM (e.g., imagery) critical for cuing

– Linked to or part of the “Self” and goal• Importance of self and goal hierarchy in

Conway’s recent work

– “Constructive” nature• 30% new details, 40% change in those

called “distinctive”, over retest (Anderson & Conway, 94)

– But also largely accurate• Constraints on errors• Rehearsal and stabilization of stories

• Organization of AM– Conway & Rubin’s hierarchical model

• Life Periods around Themes• General Events and “minihistories”• Event-specific Knowledge and details

• Retrieval of AM– Retrieval as cyclic and effortful

• General events the “typical” entry point via cues (cf. Rosch’s Basic Level?)

• Top two levels accessed “semantically”• ESK within events accessed

chronologically?– Free recall at first faster, then slower,

than chronological (Anderson & Conway 93)

• The pleasures of remembering– Photos, scrapbooks and diaries

Crovitz & Schiffman, 1974cue-word recall of AM

Wagenaar 1986Diary-based cued recall of AM

Wagenaar 1986AM content and access

Functions are Wagenaar’s ratings at time of event,With “`1” the lowest in all cases