Transcript No Slide Title

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
– Socializing, bonding and constructing
the “self” through recounting our story
• Proust’s 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
• Organization of AM
– Conway & Rubin’s hierarchical model
• Life Periods around Themes
• General Events and “minihistories”
• Event-specific Knowledge and details
METHODS OF TESTING
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 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
• 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?
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The “self schema”
Self-referent semantic knowledge
Oft-told stories
The “permastore” of conceptual
knowledge
Crovitz & Schiffman, 1974
cue-word recall of AM
Wagenaar 1986
Diary-based cued recall of AM