Knowledge structures in the organization and retrieval of autobiographical memories

Regret as autobiographical memory

“…Specific memories take longer to retrieve in response to affect cues than they do to activity and object cues (Robinson, 1976) or lifetime periods (Conway & Bekerian, 1987), and although Linton (1986) placed valence at the top of her hierarchy, she found emotion labels themselves to be very poor memory cues, as others have also found (Beike, Adams & Wirth-Beaumont, 2007;Reiser, Black & Abelson, 1985).…”

“…General events are highly accessible, as Barsalou (1988) discovered, and this has led Reiser, Black and Abelson (1985) and (Conway, 1992) to suggest that they represents a basic level category of knowledge, which is considered to be the optimal level at which concept knowledge can be represented (Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, Boyes-Braem, 1976 ). Categories at the basic level are neither too abstract nor too detailed to be functionally useful.…”

“…Events at this level have been called details (Linton, 1986;Tulving, 1972), moments (Schooler & Herrmann, 1992) or phenomenological records (Conway, 1992). What characterises events at this level is that they are typically accompanied by imagery and other perceptual details (Brewer, 1986;Rubin, 1996) and although such events do not usually make effective retrieval cues under normal circumstances (Conway & Bekerian, 1987;Reiser et al, 1985) they may be vividly remembered when they concern exceptionally shocking (Brown & Kulik, 1977) or personally important (Pillemer, 1998;Rubin & Kozin, 1984) events. Neisser (1988) describes the organisation of autobiographical knowledge in similar terms to Barsalou (1988), though he chooses the ecologically derived term "nested" to describe how one event can be nested within another.…”

“…As a basic level category (Conway, 1992) general events represent the maximum amount of information that can be processed with the minimum amount of cognitive effort, and the general event level is the preferred point of entry into the autobiographical memory knowledge base, making general events highly accessible (Conway & Bekerian, 1987;Reiser et al, 1985). Moreover, as previously stated, general events and lifetime periods are used extensively in organising the personal narrative (Barsalou, 1988;Bluck & Habermas, 2000;Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000).…”

“…The superior accessibility of general inaction regrets for instance can be explained by the fact that the general level of event representation is the preferred level of access to the autobiographical memory knowledge base (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) and general level events are known to provide quicker access when used as primes (Conway & Bekerian, 1987;Reiser, Black & Abelson, 1985). The alternative proposed here is very simple: since inaction regrets tend to be general in nature they will touch more domains, be attached to more consequences, and be more frequently rehearsed than action regrets, which tend to concern specific events.…”