AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

1
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

• The ecological movement
• Neissers 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

2
Memory for Ones Life StoryContent and Process

• Biography and Culture
• Biography as historical record
• Biography as narrative
• The oral history movement
• AM as a social activity
• Socializing, bonding and constructing the self
  through recounting our story
• Prousts In Search of Lost Time (1922)
• 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?
• Content of AM
• AM as composite of episodic (spatiotemporal
  context) and semantic (personal and factual)
  information

3

• Organization of AM
• Conway Rubins hierarchical model
• Life Periods around Themes
• General Events and minihistories
• Event-specific Knowledge and details

4
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

5

• The forgetting function for AM
• Strong recency effect
• Quasilinear or power function?
• Wagenaar, 1986
• Content and cuing variables
• Salience and emotionality
• Number and type of cues
• Deviations from the curve
• Infantile amnesia and its causes
• The reminiscence bump 15-25 yrs
• Crovitz Schiffman, 1974
• What is retained over a lifetime?
• The self schema
• Self-referent semantic knowledge
• Oft-told stories
• The permastore of conceptual knowledge

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Crovitz Schiffman, 1974cue-word recall of AM
7
Wagenaar 1986Diary-based cued recall of AM