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Autobiographical Memory Lecture WITH AUDIO

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Brennan J.G. Kumitch
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132 views

Autobiographical Memory Lecture WITH AUDIO

Uploaded by

Brennan J.G. Kumitch
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

Autobiographical Memory

Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Learning Objectives
•
1 Describe the characteristics of autobiographical memory
•
2 Examine the developmental aspects of autobiographical memory
•
3 Recall the factors that influence autobiographical memory retrieval
•
4 Recognize the ways that emotion can impact autobiographical memories

Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
1: Everyday Memory
• What Is Autobiographical Memory?
– Autobiographic episodes
• Episodic memory (Tulving, 1972)
• Mental representations of past events
• Elements of original context
• Sense of reliving or mental time travel
• Conway (2009): eight characteristics
– Autobiographical knowledge
• Network of concepts about one’s own life
• Example: Purdue University, wedding

Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Table 1
Eight Characteristics of Autobiographical Episodes (Based on Conway, 2009)

1 Includes sensory, perceptual, and emotional features from the


original event
2 Often represented in the form of visual images
3 Viewed from either a field perspective (through one’s own eyes)
or an observer perspective (as if you were watching yourself)
4 Represents short (limited) “slices” of time; events last minutes
or hours, rather than months or years.
5 Represented temporally in rough order of occurrence; we
generally know the relative time position of autobiographical
memories.
6 Rapidly forgotten
7 Their level of detail makes them distinct from other memories
8 Access is accompanied by an experience of “re-living”

Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
2: Developmental Aspects of
Autobiographical Memory
– Changes across the lifespan
• Childhood amnesia – very few memories before the age
of about 4
• Reminiscence bump – disproportionately great number of
memories from ages 10-30
• Expands into first decade of life with introduction of
smell (Proust phenomenon)
• Neural structures underlying olfaction (sense of smell)
are located in close proximity to the hippocampus and
temporal regions crucial for memory
• Forgetting curve – standard forgetting curve for the years
after this bump (after 30 tend to recall events that recently
happened); lack of rehearsal & routine
Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
2: Developmental Aspects of
Autobiographical Memory
• Childhood Amnesia
– Accounts of childhood amnesia
• Emphasis on problems at encoding & retrieval
• Brain physiology (first 18 months of life)
• Lack of sophisticated language ability
• Development of sense of self
• Development of consciousness of the past
• Inability to bind components

Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
2: Developmental Aspects of
Autobiographical Memory
• Forgetting
– Cultural differences
• Western culture emphasis on autonomy - individuals are
encouraged to retain specific event information about themselves
and engage in more rehearsal of it
• Euro-Americans remember getting a new toy, Asian Americans
remember playing with the toy
• Eastern cultures tends to engage in holistic perceptual
processing, leading them to focus on similarities and
relationships among objects and events
• Western cultures tend to engage in analytic processing, leading
them to focus on individual objects and events
• Difference stems from encoding rather than rehearsal

Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
3: Autobiographical Memory Retrieval
• Involuntary Autobiographical Memories
– Differences between voluntary and involuntary retrieval
• Involuntary occurs more quickly; activation spread
• Involuntary more likely elicited by negative cues
– Encoding specificity principle – match between a cue and central
elements of the memory
– PTSD and involuntary memory
• Disorder of memory - vivid flashbacks and as if occurring in the
present moment, yet difficult to voluntarily recall
• Berwin (2014)
̵ Long-term perceptual memory
̵ Episodic memory system

Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
4: Emotion and Autobiographical
Remembering
• Flashbulb Memories
= A detailed, vivid, and confidently held memory for the circumstances
surrounding when you first heard some startling bit of news
– Rehearsal (90% accuracy)
– Over year 1 (90%-80%) and then remains
– Characteristics of a flashbulb memory
 Location
 Activity
 Source
 Emotion
 Aftermath

Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
4: Emotion and Autobiographical
Remembering
• Depression and Autobiographical Memory
̶ Four mnemonic horsemen of
depression
̶ Interact and combine in ways
that maintain depression and
elevate the risk of recurrence
even after remission

Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
4: Emotion and Autobiographical
Remembering
• Depression and Autobiographical Memory
– Memory therapeutics
• Memory specificity training
• Train individuals to be more specific in their recall
• Increase recall of positive memories
• Over several sessions, spread out over a period of days,
individuals receive practice in retrieving specific and
concrete memories in response to positive and neutral
single-word cues, then negative, then all types of cues
• “Homework” to bring in one positive, concrete, and
specific memory from their own life
• Changing the negative memory bias by helping reinterpret and
“re-script” negative autobiographical memories to reduce their
negative impact
Copyright © 2017, 2012, 2008 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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