(7) Autobiographical memory

Question 1

What is Autobiographical memory?

Answer 1

• Own personal history
• Made up of episodic, semantic and procedural memory
• Use of imagery, spatial temporal context
• Records of meaning, facts and concepts
• Importance of information to one’s self of sense (critical feature)

Question 2

What did Galton (1879) find about when he tried to learn words from a piece of paper?

Answer 2

• Participants: N = 1
• Procedure: 75 words on a piece of paper, tried to learn them. Each word was a cue word to trigger certain memories. Repeated these 4 times with the same words.
• Findings: memories from adulthood, same associations, 289 words were different. Retrieving the same things

Question 3

What did Crovitz and Schiffman, 1974 investigate about diary studies?

Answer 3

• Rediscovery of Galton’s word cuing technique (Crovitz and Schiffman, 1974)
• Participants: 98
• Procedure: 20 cue words
• Frequency of memories decreased as a function of the age of the memory, more memories occur in recent times
• Don’t really know what the participants experience was

Question 4

What did Linton (1975) find doing a personal 5 year diary study?

Answer 4

• Participants: 1
• Procedure: recorded events in a diary, then later checked her memories against the diary. Did this over a 5 year period. Tested herself every month of order of events and the specific dates
• Results: sometimes tested herself more than once, up to 4 times. Rehearsal plays a big role in remembering. Positive events were remembered more

Question 5

What did Brown and Kulik (1977) find about flashbulb memories and assassination cases?

Answer 5

• Memories were so vivid of the assassination it became flashbulb memory
• 80 participants, 40 were black Americans, 40 were white
• Given a questionnaire, given events and had to recall what order they remembered the event
• Black participants remembered those who were killed for racial reasons
• Event must be significant or consequential

Question 6

What are the Canonical categories?

Answer 6

• Place
• Ongoing activity
• Informant
• Own affect
• Other affect
• Aftermath

Question 7

What did Schmoclk, Buffalo and Squire (2000) find about memories of the OJ Simpson trial?

Answer 7

• Publicised criminal trial
• Participants: 222
• Asked how they felt about the verdict of the OJ Simpson trial
• 2 groups: mailed another questionnaire 15 or 32 months later to test whether flashbulb memories were accurate
• Asked about specific events about when they heard the news, if they are special memories there should be no differences in the time points
• Majority had no distortions regardless of timeframe, however there were some minor and major distortions which goes against the hypothesis

Question 8

What was Conway (1996)’s Hierarchical model?

Answer 8

• Event specific memories
• General events
• Lifetime periods – personal ways we organised our autobiographical past
• Working self – monitoring function that controls retrieval of information from these different levels of representation (e.g. our goals)

Question 9

What is Infantile amnesia?

Answer 9

• Inability to recall childhood memories from the first 3-5 years of life
• Lower than expected if you just consider forgetting
• Miles 1893 – published first account
• Freud believed it was due to repression
• Believed that no memories were formed, or some formed but were inaccessible (cognitive or biological changes, disrupts ability to recall)

Question 10

What did Nelson (1993) find when looking at a case study of infantile amnesia?

Answer 10

• Emily 2 ½ years of age
• Recorded recalling events from 2 months earlier (e.g. car breaking down), shows that memories can be formed
• Some from the previous day, others from up to 6 months ago

Question 11

What is a Reminiscence bump?

Answer 11

• Asked to recall events between 15-30, more likely to remember
• Events in this time period are pretty salient, big life events
• Life narrative represents an account of our lives as we progress
• Positive and emotionally intense

Question 12

What is the Life narrative hypothesis, Gluck and Bluck (2007)?

Answer 12

• Participants: 659, 50-90 years old
• Procedure: list 15 life events, date them, rate them with respect to valence, perceived control etc
• reminiscence bump occurs for positive events but not for negative events (some refer to WWII related events)
• Anchoring events

Question 13

What is Cultural transmission?

Answer 13

• Passing on knowledge, skills abilities to communicate and social norms in a social context than biologically
• Possible that parents passed on song choice

Question 14

What did Joslyn and Oakes (2005) find about memory tests and memory recall of diary entries?

Answer 14

• Participants: 42
• Procedure: week 1 diary pack, had to record two unique events
• Had to return week 1 diary, told that week 1 would not be tested but week 2 would be, week 3 they were given a memory test to recall memories from week 1 and week 2
• Findings: forget group remembered week 2 more than week 1, similarities between both weeks in remember group

Question 15

What is PTSD?

Answer 15

• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Involves flashbacks – vivid memories of the terror
• Memory disorder more than an anxiety disorder

Question 16

What was the case study of Hyperthymestic syndrome?

Answer 16

• Case study: AJ
• Really good memory, good knowledge of dates
• Strengths: general memory, recognition memory; face perception, digit span test
• Weakness: executive of functioning and reasoning tasks; motor speed, recall of complex figures
• Average: reading level, spelling, vocabulary and arithmetic