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"Rubin, David C"
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Understanding autobiographical memory : theories and approaches
\"The field of autobiographical memory has made dramatic advances since the first collection of papers in the area was published in 1985. Now, over twenty-five years on, this book reviews and integrates the many theories, perspectives and approaches that have evolved over the last decades. A truly eminent collection of editors and contributors appraise the basic neural systems of autobiographical memory; its underlying cognitive structures and retrieval processes; how it develops in infancy and childhood, and then breaks down in aging; its social and cultural aspects; and its relation to personality and the self. Autobiographical memory has demonstrated a strong ability to establish clear empirical generalizations and shown its practical relevance by deepening our understanding of several clinical disorders - including the induction of false memories in the legal system. It has also become an important topic for brain studies and helped to enlarge our general understanding of the brain\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A conceptual space for episodic and semantic memory
I propose a model that places episodic, semantic, and other commonly studied forms of memory into the same conceptual space. The space is defined by three dimensions required for Tulving’s episodic and semantic memory. An implicit–explicit dimension contrasts both episodic and semantic memory with common forms of implicit memory. A self-reference dimension contrasts episodes that occurred to one person with semantic knowledge. A scene dimension contrasts episodes that occurred in specific contexts with context-free semantic information. The three dimensions are evaluated against existing behavioral and neural evidence to evaluate both the model and the concepts underlying the study of human memory. Unlike a hierarchy, which has properties specific to each category, the dimensions have properties that extend throughout the conceptual space. Thus, the properties apply to all forms of existing and yet-to-be-discovered memory within the space. Empty locations in the proposed space are filled with existing phenomena that lack a clear place in current theories of memory, including reports of episodic-like memories for events reported to but not witnessed by a person, fictional narrative accounts, déjà vu, and implicit components contributing to personality, the self, and autobiographical memory.
Journal Article
Self-narrative focus in autobiographical events: The effect of time, emotion, and individual differences
Individuals may take a
self-narrative focus
on the meaning of personal events in their life story, rather than viewing the events in isolation. Using the Centrality of Event Scale (CES; Berntsen & Rubin in
Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44,
219–231,
2006
) as our measure, we investigated self-narrative focus as an individual differences variable in addition to its established role as a measure of individual events. Three studies, with 169, 182, and 190 participants had 11, 10, and 11 different events varied across the dimensions of remembered past versus imagined future, distance from the present, and valence. Imagined future events, events more distant from the present, and positive events all had increased self-narrative focus, in agreement with published theories and findings. Nonetheless, CES ratings for individual events correlated positively with each other within individuals (
r
~ .30) and supported a single factor solution. These results are consistent with a stable individual differences tendency toward self-narrative focus that transcends single events. Thus, self-narrative focus is both a response whereby people relate individual events to their life story and identity and an individual differences variable that is stable over a range of events. The findings are discussed in relation to narrative measures of autobiographical reasoning.
Journal Article
A TALE of Three Functions: The Self–Reported Uses of Autobiographical Memory
Theories hold that autobiographical memory serves several broad functions (directive, self, and social). In the current study, items were derived from the theoretical literature to create the Thinking About Life Experiences (TALE) questionnaire to empirically assess these three functions. Participants (N = 167) completed the TALE. To examine convergent validity, they also rated their overall tendency to think about and to talk about the past and completed the Reminiscence Functions Scale (Webster, 1997). The results lend support to the existence of these theoretical functions, but also offer room for refinements in future thinking about both the breadth and specificity of the functions that autobiographical memory serves. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
The reappearance hypothesis revisited: Recurrent involuntary memories after traumatic events and in everyday life
Recurrent involuntary memories are autobiographical memories that come to mind with no preceding retrieval attempt and that are subjectively experienced as being repetitive. Clinically, they are classified as a symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder. The present work is the first to systematically examine recurrent involuntary memories outside clinical settings. Study 1 examines recurrent involuntary memories among survivors of the tsunami catastrophe in Southeast Asia in 2004. Study 2 examines recurrent involuntary memories in a large general population. Study 3 examines whether the contents of recurrent involuntary memories recorded in a diary study are duplicates of, or differ from, one another. We show that recurrent involuntary memories are not limited to clinical populations or to emotionally negative experiences; that they typically do not come to mind in a fixed and unchangeable form; and that they show the same pattern regarding accessibility as do autobiographical memories in general. We argue that recurrent involuntary memories after traumas and in everyday life can be explained in terms of general and well-established mechanisms of autobiographical memory.
Journal Article
Recent Advances in Understanding the Reminiscence Bump: The Importance of Cues in Guiding Recall From Autobiographical Memory
The reminiscence bump is the increased proportion of autobiographical memories from youth and early adulthood observed in adults over 40. It is one of the most robust findings in autobiographical-memory research. Although described as a single period from which there are more memories, a recent meta-analysis that reported the beginning and ending ages of the bump from individual studies found that different classes of cues produce distinct bumps that vary in size and temporal location. The bump obtained in response to cue words is both smaller and located earlier in the life span than the bump obtained when important memories are requested. The bump obtained in response to odor cues is even earlier. This variation in the size and temporal location of the reminiscence bump argues for theories based primarily on retrieval rather than encoding and retention, which most current theories stress. Furthermore, it points to the need to develop theories of autobiographical memory that account for this flexibility in the memories retrieved.
Journal Article
The Basic-Systems Model of Episodic Memory
Behavior, neuropsychology, and neuroimaging suggest that episodic memories are constructed from interactions among the following basic systems: vision, audition, olfaction, other senses, spatial imagery, language, emotion, narrative, motor output, explicit memory, and search and retrieval. Each system has its own well-documented functions, neural substrates, processes, structures, and kinds of schemata. However, the systems have not been considered as interacting components of episodic memory, as is proposed here. Autobiographical memory and oral traditions are used to demonstrate the usefulness of the basic-systems model in accounting for existing data and predicting novel findings, and to argue that the model, or one similar to it, is the only way to understand episodic memory for complex stimuli routinely encountered outside the laboratory.
Journal Article
People over forty feel 20% younger than their age: Subjective age across the lifespan
Subjective age--the age people think of themselves asbeing--is measured in a representative Danish sample of 1,470 adults between 20 and 97 years of age through personal, in-home interviews. On the average, adults younger than 25 have older subjective ages, and those older than 25 have younger subjective ages, favoring a lifespan-developmental view over an age-denial view of subjective age. When the discrepancy between subjective and chronological age is calculated as a proportion of chronological age, no increase is seen after age 40; older respondents feel 20% younger than their actual age. Demographic variables (gender, income, and education) account for very little variance in subjective age.
Journal Article
A Basic-Systems Approach to Autobiographical Memory
Memory for complex everyday events involving vision, hearing, smell, emotion, narrative, and language cannot be understood without considering the properties of the separate systems that process and store each of these forms of information. Using this premise as a starting point, my colleagues and I found that visual memory plays a central role in autobiographical memory: The strength of recollection of an event is predicted best by the vividness of its visual imagery, and a loss of visual memory causes a general amnesia. Examination of autobiographical memories in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suggests that the lack of coherence often noted in memories of traumatic events is not due to a lack of coherence either of the memory itself or of the narrative that integrates the memory into the life story. Rather, making the traumatic memory central to the life story correlates positively with increased PTSD symptoms. The basic-systems approach has yielded insights into autobiographical memory's phenomenology, neuropsychology, clinical disorders, and neural basis.
Journal Article
What psychology and cognitive neuroscience know about the communicative function of memory
Mahr & Csibra (M&C) include interesting ideas about the nature of memory from outside of the field of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. However, the target article's inaccurate claims about those fields limit its usefulness. I briefly review the most serious omissions and distortions of the literature by the target article, including its misrepresentation of event memory, and offer suggestions for forwarding the goal of understanding the communicative function of memory.
Journal Article