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Autobiographical memory

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Also known as Episodic memory.

An autobiographical memory is a personal representation of general or specific events and personal facts. Autobiographical memory also refers to memory of a person’s history. An individual does not remember exactly everything that has happened in one’s past. Memory is constructive, where previous experience affects how we remember events and what we end up recalling from memory. Autobiographical memory is constructive and reconstructed as an evolving process of past history. A person’s autobiographical memory is fairly reliable; although, the reliability of autobiographical memories is questionable because of memory distortions.

Autobiographical memories can differ for special periods of life. People recall few personal events from the first years of their lives. The loss of these first events is called childhood or infantile amnesia. People tend to recall many personal events from adolescence and early adulthood. This effect is called the reminiscence bump. Finally, people recall many personal events from the last few years. This is called the recency effect. For adolescents and young adults the reminiscence bump and the recency effect coincide.



Contents

[edit] Types

  • Specific Events
  • When one first stepped foot in the ocean. On a family trip to California.
  • General Events
  • What it is like stepping into the ocean for oneself generally. This is a memory of what a personal event is generally like. One might have based it on the memories of having stepped in the ocean, many times during the years one lived in California.
  • Personal Facts
  • "Who was the Prime Minister of Canada when I was born?"
  • Flash Bulb Memories
  • Flash Bulb memories are critical autobiographical memories about a major event. Some flash bulb memories are shared within a social group.
"Where were you on 9/11?"
"The assassination of John Kennedy?"
"The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.?"
"The Challenger explosion?"


[edit] The role of autobiographical memory in the construction of a sense of self

[edit] See also

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Key Texts – Books

  • Hermans, D Raes, F Philippot, P Kremers,I(2006)(eds) Autobiographical Memory Specificity and Psychopathology. A Special Issue of Cognition and Emotion. ISBN 184169987X
  • Dalgleish,Tim & ABrewin, Chris ( 2007)(eds) Autobiographical Memory and Emotional Disorder-A special issue of the journal Memory. Psychology Press ISBN 978-1-84169-833-5

Edited by

[edit] Additional material – Books

[edit] Key Texts – Papers

  • Brown, R., & Kulik, J. (1977). Flashbulb memories. Cognition, 5, 73-99.
  • Harley, K and Reese, E. (1999) 'Origins of Autobiographical Memory', Developmental Psychology 35, 1338-1348.
  • Howe, M.L. and Courage, M.L. (1997). 'The Emergence and Development of Autobiographical Memory', Psychological Review 104, 499-523
  • Mullen, M.K. and Yi, Soonhyung (1995). 'The Cultural Context of Talk about the Past: implications for the development of autobiographical memory', Cognitive Development 10, 407-419.
  • Nelson, K.(1993). 'The Psychological and Social Origins of Autobiographical Memory', Psychological Science 4, 7-14.
  • Rubin, D. C., Schrauf, R. W., & Greenberg, D. L. (2003). Belief and recollection of autobiographical memories. Memory and Cognition, 31, 887-901.
  • Singer, J A & Bluck, S (2001). Autobiographical Memory.Review of General Psychology.Volume 5, #2, June. Special Issue
  • Sutton,J. (2002)'Cognitive Conceptions of Language and the Development of Autobiographical Memory', Language and Communication 22, 375-390.
  • Welch-Ross, Melissa (1995). 'An Integrative Model of the Development of Autobiographical Memory', Developmental Review 15, 338-365.

[edit] Additional material - Papers

  • Conway, M.A. & Pleydell-Pearce, C.W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107, 261-288. Full text
  • Klein, S., German, T., Cosmides, L. & Gabriel, R. (2004). A theory of autobiographical memory: Necessary components and disorders resulting from their loss. Social Cognition, 22, 460-490. Full text
  • Taylor, S.E., Fiske, S.T., Etcoff, N.L. and Ruderman, A.J. (1978). The categorical and contextual bases of personal memory and stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 778-3.

[edit] External links

Memory
Types of memory
Auditory memory | Autobiographical memory | Collective memory | Early memories | Echoic Memory | Eidetic memory | Episodic memory | Explicit memory  |Exosomatic memory | False memory |Flashbulb memory | Iconic memory | Implicit memory | Institutional memory | Long term memory | Procedural memory | Prospective memory | Repressed memory | Retrospective memory | Semantic memory | Sensory memory | Short term memory | Spatial memory | State-dependent memory | Tonal memory | Transactive memory  | Verbal memory  | Visual memory  | Visuospatial memory  | Working memory  |
Aspects of memory
Childhood amnesia | Cryptomnesia |Cued recall | Eye-witness testimony | Memory and emotion | Forgetting |Forgetting curve | Free recall | Levels-of-processing effect | Memory consolidation |Memory decay | Memory distrust syndrome |Memory inhibition | Memory and smell | Memory loss | Memory optimization | Memory trace | Mnemonic | Memory biases  | Tip of the tongue | Lethologica | Priming | Primacy effect | Reconstruction | Proactive interference | Prompting | Recency effect | Recall (learning) | Recognition (learning) | Reminiscence | Retention | Retroactive interference | Serial position effect | Serial recall | Source amnesia |
Memory theory
Memory encoding | Baddeley | Memory-prediction framework | Memory consolidation | Forgetting | Recall | Recognition | Atkinson-Shiffrin | Interference theory | Memory-prediction framework | Dual-coding theory |Decay theory |
Mnemonics
Method of loci | Mnemonic room system | Mnemonic dominic system | Mnemonic link system |Mnemonic major system | Mnemonic peg system | [[]] | [[]] | [[]] |[[]] |
Neuroanatomy of memory
Amygdala | Hippocampus | prefrontal cortex  | Neurobiology of working memory | Neurophysiology of memory | Rhinal cortex | [[]] |[[]] |
Neurochemistry of memory
Glutamatergic system  | of short term memory | [[]] |[[]] | [[]] | [[]] | [[]] | [[]] |[[]] |
Memory in clinical settings
Alcohol amnestic disorder | Amnesia | Dissociative fugue | False memory syndrome | False memory | Hyperthymesia | Memory and aging | Memory disorders | Repressed memory | Traumatic memory |
Assessment of memory
Benton | CAMPROMPT  MAS | MERMER | Rey-15 | Rivermead | TOMM | Wechsler | WMT |
Treating memory problems
CBT | EMDR | Psychotherapy | Recovered memory therapy |Reminiscence therapy | Memory clinic | Memory training | Rewind technique |
Prominant workers in memory|-
Baddeley | Broadbent |Ebbinghaus  | Kandel |McGaugh | Schacter  | Treisman | Tulving  |
Philosophy and historical views of memory
Aristotle | [[]] |[[]] |[[]] |[[]] | [[]] | [[]] | [[]] |
Miscellaneous
Journals | Learning, Memory, and Cognition |Journal of Memory and Language |Memory |Memory and Cognition | [[]] | [[]] | [[]] |
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