No abstract

A total of 59 older Danes recorded five life story memories. They divided their life story into chapters and provided their age for the start and end of each chapter. Life story memories were coded for whether they were placed at the start or end of chapters and for their correspondence to the cultural life script. Chapters and life story memories showed a bump in terms of an increased recall of life story memories and chapters between ages 6 and 30. Chapter start and end memories, more frequently than other memories, referred to prominent cultural life script events. The bump was significantly stronger for memories that referred to both prominent cultural life script events and chapter starts or ends. The findings suggest that the cultural life script helps to identify beginning and ends of chapters in autobiographical memory, and that both the cultural life script and organisation in terms of chapters influence the recall of life story memories and may help to explain the bump.

One hundred forty-five Danes between 72 and 89 years of age were asked for their memories of their reception of the news of the Danish occupation (April 1940) and liberation (May 1945) and for their most negative and most positive personal memories from World War II. Almost all reported memories for the invasion and liberation. Their answers to factual questions (e.g., the weather) were corroborated against objective records and compared with answers from a younger control group. The older participants were far more accurate than what could be predicted on the basis of results from test-retest studies using short delays. The "permastore" metaphor (Bahrick, 1984) provides a possible interpretation of this discrepancy. Participants with reported ties to the resistance movement had more vivid, detailed, and accurate memories than did participants without such ties. Ratings of surprise and consequentiality were unrelated to the accuracy and clarity of the memories.

People not only have vivid memories of their own personal experiences, but also vicarious memories of events that happened to other people. To compare the phenomenological and functional qualities of personal and vicarious memories, college students described a specific past event that they had recounted to a parent or friend, and also an event that a friend or parent had recounted to them. Although ratings of memory vividness, emotional intensity, visualization, and physical reactions were higher for personal than for vicarious memories, the overall pattern of ratings was similar. Participants' ratings also indicated that vicarious memories serve many of the same life functions as personal memories, although at lower levels of intensity. The findings suggest that current conceptions of autobiographical memory, which focus on past events that happened directly to the self, should be expanded to include detailed mental representations of specific past events that happened to other people.

Current theories focus on the role of specific memories in organising the life story. However, temporally extended structures of autobiographical memory, like lifetime periods and mini-narratives (here termed chapters), may also play a central role in the organisation of the life story. Here, 30 elderly participants were asked to tell their life story in a free format. The life stories were divided into components and coded as chapters, specific memories, categoric memories, facts, chapters about other people, and autobiographical reasoning categories, i.e., reflections, evaluations, life lessons, and inferences about personality. The results show that chapters were much more common than specific memories in the life stories, indicating that chapters may play a role in the structuring of life stories. The number of chapters and specific memories in the life stories were unrelated, suggesting that the recounting of chapters versus specific memories does not reflect a preferred recall style.