Themes, events, and episodes in autobiographical memory

Abstract

The process by which experience is divided into events was examined. Experiment 1 involved diarists recording their experiences over a 3-month period. Diary entries were later transcribed onto cards and the diarists arranged their cards so as to define events they had experienced, and in a separate phase arranged their cards so as to describe the themes that reflected their life. Examination of event-and theme-building strategies indicated that boundaries were frequently used, and events and themes were often formed from clusters of experience combined using content association rather than temporal sequence. Experiment 2 involved photographs taken by the participants, employed the same procedures as in Experiment 1, and revealed event-and theme-building strategiessimilar to those identified in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3 the size of the stimulus set from which events and themes were constructed was manipulated; this did not influence construction strategies. Overall, the experiments show that both autobiographical events and themes frequently consist of episodes taken from more than 1 day.

Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory

“…Within this framework, higher levels provide access to down fashion, such that providing participants with cues from higher levels facilitates retrieval of episodic AMs (e.g., Conway & Bekerian, 1987) structure (e.g., morning versus afternoon) may lead to more accurate temporal ordering of episodic AMs. A single episodic AM, which represents the lowest or most specific level of the hierarchy, is typically what we think of as AM, ntial evidence suggesting that semantic AMs are the preferred (Barsalou, 1988;Burt, Kemp, & Conway, 2003; . Generic knowledge is the basic level or entry point to AMs and episodic AMs are dditional generative or direct retrieval processes (Conway, 2005;Pearce, 2000).…”

A test of the peak-end rule with extended autobiographical events

“…Much research has focused on which events or aspects of events are most likely to be remembered. For example, the beginnings and ends of events are often particularly well remembered (e.g., Burt et al, 2003), as are events that are subsequently important to us, or those that excited strong emotion at the time (Shum, 1998).…”

Mechanisms of autobiographical memory retrieval in younger and older adults

“…Access to specific events would be facilitated according to this model when retrieval takes place within the context of a lifetime period, because this lifetime period provides a retrieval context of autobiographical information along temporal and thematic dimensions that enables a more direct search of events than when no such context is present (Burt, Kemp, & Conway, 2003).…”