Autobiographical Memories

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Autobiographical Memories
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Autobiographical Memories

• How well can we remember personal experiences and
  events from the past?
• What kind of memories are remembered best?
• Do memories change over time?

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Autobiographical Memories

• In the last six months, you have become involved
  with the college.
• Write down, quietly and by yourself, the
  recollections you have of the following

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Autobiographical Memories

• the day you enrolled
• your first psychology lesson
• Tuesday October 9th 2006
• what did you have for dinner on 25th November?
• what did you have for dinner on Christmas Day?

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Marigold Linton

• Marigold Linton (1982) systematic study of her
  own memory over six years
• every day, wrote on cards brief description of at
  least two events that occurred that day
• every month, re-read two of these descriptions,
  taken at random from the collection, and tried to
  remember the events described, the order in which
  they occurred and the date of each event
• rated each event for salience (importance) and
  emotionality both at the time of writing and
  again at the time of recall

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Marigold Linton

• For me, a typical day might include
• Meeting for degree inspection low salience, low
  emotionality
• Went to choir practice - low salience, low
  emotionality

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Marigold Linton

• In say, one years time, I would probably
  remember the meeting but not the choir practice.
• Return to the memories I asked you to recall

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Marigold Linton

• Marigold Linton found the same.
• Two types of forgetting
• One common form was repetition of the same or
  similar occurrences

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Marigold Linton

• Your first psychology lesson may be more
  distinctive than one in October, but you may have
  a memory of the last lesson (I hope so!)

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Marigold Linton

• Linton gives an example
• She regularly attended committee meetings in
  another town
• First meeting and most recent meetings remained
  distinctive.
• The rest could not be differentiated from each
  other in memory.
• She had a schema for meetings

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Schemas

• A schema is a mental representation of all the
  experience and knowledge you have of a concept,
  an object or whatever.
• We will talk to each other about schemas.
• Going to college
• Dinner
• Christmas Dinner

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Episodic and Semantic
Semantic memory Storing facts, generalized
information, concepts, in the form of
schemashowing the meaningful associations with
the concept of Christmas Dinner
Episodic memory Storing personal
experiencerecalling first day at college
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Episodic and Semantic

• Episodic memory
• Type of information represented-
• Specific events, objects, places, people

• Semantic memory
• Type of information represented-
• General knowledge and facts about events and
  objects

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• Episodic
• How organised in memory?
• Chronological (i.e. by time of occurrence) or
  spatial (by place of occurrence)

• Semantic
• How organised in memory?
• In schemas (packets of general knowledge relating
  to the same object)

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• Episodic
• Source of information
• Personal experiences

• Semantic
• Source of information
• Abstraction from repeated experiences
• Generalisations learned from other experiences

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• Semantic
• Focus
• Objective Reality
• (the world)

• Episodic
• Focus
• Subjective Reality
• (the self)

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Declarative Memory

• Episodic and Semantic memory are types of
  Declarative Memory.
• Declarative memory is a kind of I know that
  for example, I know that the sky is blue

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Procedural Memory

• Procedural memory is where we store the knowledge
  of how to do something.
• This applies especially to a physical task, such
  as
• Riding a bicycle.
• Walking
• Staying afloat (i.e. swimming, not a boat!)

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Procedural Memory

• Procedural memory is like I know how to (ride
  a bike, stay afloat, play a musical instrument
  etc)
• But the memory is not open to inspection.

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Procedural Memory

• Tulving has investigated the possibility of
  different types of LTM, i.e. declarative and
  procedural
• Pennington page 268

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Types of Memory
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Procedural memory
The relationship between types of LT memory and
varieties of consciousness (Tulving, 1985).
Degree of conscious awareness
Memory System
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The case of H.M.

• Corkin (1968) page 269 Pennington
• Surgery on brain - Memory affected
• Given declarative tasks no memory overnight
• Given procedural tasks
• No memory of learning the task but did retain the
  ability.
• Conclusion?