Transition Theory: A Minimalist Perspective on the Organization of Autobiographical Memory

Beyond the episodic-semantic continuum: the multidimensional model of mental representations

Tulving's concept of mental time travel (MTT), and the related distinction of episodic and semantic memory, have been highly influential contributions to memory research, resulting in a wealth of findings and a deeper understanding of the neurocognitive correlates of memory and future thinking. Many models have conceptualized episodic and semantic representations as existing on a continuum that can help to account for various hybrid forms. Nevertheless, in most theories, MTT remains distinctly associated with episodic representations. In this article, we review existing models of memory and future thinking, and critically evaluate whether episodic representations are distinct from other types of explicit representations, including whether MTT as a neurocognitive capacity is uniquely episodic. We conclude by proposing a new framework, the Multidimensional Model of Mental Representations (MMMR), which can parsimoniously account for the range of past, present and future representations the human mind is capable of creating. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

A role for event centrality in prolonged grief disorder

Having a traumatic or negative event at the centre of one's identity is associated with adverse psychological outcomes including post-traumatic stress, depression, and prolonged grief disorder (PGD). However, direct investigation of the role of centrality of a bereavement-event in the maintenance of PGD symptoms is scarce and has not compared immediate and long-term changes in event centrality nor examined the nature of the loss. Data from bereaved partners and adult children in The Aarhus Bereavement Study at four time points over 26 months post-loss were included in this study. Participants completed a PGD symptom measure and the Centrality of Events Scale (CES) on each occasion. Results suggest that bereaved partners had higher PGD and CES scores than bereaved adult children at all four post-bereavement time points. Regardless of relationship type, maintaining higher CES scores over time predicted PGD symptoms, over and above initial symptoms. Our findings suggest a risk factor for maintaining PGD symptoms is the continued centrality of the bereavement to ones' life story and autobiographical memory. This finding links the mechanisms for maintaining PGD symptoms to those involved in other disorders such as post-traumatic stress, with implications for theoretical models of prolonged grief as well as treatment.

Flashbulb and first-hand memories for campus closings due to COVID-19: consistency and change

Flashbulb memories (FBM) refer to the vivid and detailed retrieval of the reception context of a highly salient event. We examined FBMs and personal memories for one college's sudden transition to remote learning due to COVID-19. We explored whether the announcement of the campus' closure resulted in FBMs, how respondents felt about the decision, and the impacts of the decision. Employing a two-wave longitudinal survey conducted in March and May 2020, participants responded to questions regarding learning about the campus' closure and a control memory (an event from the same week chosen by participants). Participant reports suggested they did form FBMs, and FBMs were more consistent over time than control memories. Confidence did not differ across memory types. Additionally, we observed an initial strong positive response to the decision to close the campus - a sentiment that intensified over time. Lastly, participants' emotional responses transitioned from negative feelings in the first wave of testing to more neutral feelings in the second. This work offers a unique exploration of FBMs within the broader context of a global health crisis that intruded into daily life, effectively merging the typically public and distant nature of flashbulb events with first-hand, personal experience.

Impact of Natural Disasters on Mental Health: Evidence and Implications

Natural disasters are large-scale catastrophic events, and they are increasing in frequency and severity. Converging evidence indicates that the mental health consequences of disasters are extensive and are often associated with trauma and the disruption of personal and socioeconomic factors in people's lives. Although most individuals experiencing disaster-related traumatic events do not develop mental illnesses, some experience adverse psychological effects of disasters. These mental health effects begin immediately following a disaster and may persist for extended periods. In this article, we summarize the literature findings to provide a narrative review that focuses on the mental health consequences of natural disasters. An overview of the disaster mental health research field is provided, and the findings are ordered into theoretical frameworks. Then, the development and course of psychopathology regarding disaster aftermath are described in a methodological context. Next, understanding a disaster as an event of transition is highlighted, and the impact of this disaster-specific transition is discussed. Lastly, a potential relationship between the transitional impact of a disaster and mental health consequences is speculated on, and the implications are discussed. The impact of disasters on mental health can be direct or indirect, short-term or long-term, and to some extent depends on the recovery process of the affected community. Also, we propose the possible merits of using the Transitional Impact Scale in the context of disaster mental health research by assessing the features of disaster-related transition and its effects on mental health. We conclude by suggesting a direction for future research in terms of measuring the disaster mental health effects in community settings (affected vs. non-affected) and also considering cross-cultural and cross-regional differences. In recent decades, a large amount of knowledge has been gathered from disaster mental health research, but, still, more research is needed to resolve some irregular findings through refining the methodological variations.

COVID-19 memories young adults may share: exploring event properties and motivations for transmission

The COVID-19 pandemic has left an enduring mark on human history. This study investigates the intergenerational transmission of COVID-19 memories through a unique approach involving 49 participants aged 18-30. Specifically, participants were prompted to share a COVID-19 memory they would choose to transmit to their future children. Furthermore, participants provided reasons for selecting that particular memory, utilising a memory functions scale and open-ended responses. Applying Transition Theory, we examined the transitional impact, event importance, previous rehearsal, and valence of reported memories. Results revealed that 88% of memories revolve around distinctive events inducing psychological and material changes. Perceived as significant, negative, and transitional, these memories are predominantly public in nature. Predictors of event importance include previous rehearsal and psychological change. Participants share memories primarily for directive purposes, intending to inform future generations. The results imply that transitions not only organise personal memories but may also direct and shape memories for public events.

Exploring the metamnemonic and phenomenal differences between transitional and mundane events

In two experiments, we systematically investigated the reasons why people retained certain autobiographical events in their memory, as well as the properties of those events and their predicted memorability. The first experiment used three methods (word-cued, free-recalled, and "memorable, interesting, and/or important") to retrieve event memories, and examined memories from three different time-frames: very recent (within past 7 days), recent (past 2 weeks and 6 months), and older events (at least one year). In addition, data were also collected for an important transitional event recently experienced by all participants ("starting university"). The results revealed that people had access to three types of event memories: memories for life transitions, memories for older distinctive events, and memories for recent mundane events. Participants reported remembering events that were distinctive, first-time experiences, emotionally impactful, or simply because they were recent. They also predicted that older events would be more resistant to forgetting than very recent and recent events. The second experiment examined participants' memorable and forgettable events, and found that memorable events tended to be older, while forgettable events were more likely to be recent. These findings suggested that many retrievable memorable autobiographical memories were neither important nor transitional in nature. The studies contribute to our understanding of people's metamnemonic knowledge about their autobiographical memories.

The reminiscence bump and the self: evidence from five studies on positive and negative memories

A plethora of studies have shown that people persistently remember public and personal events experienced during adolescence and early adulthood, particularly with a positive valence. In five studies, we investigate the reminiscence bump (RB) for positive and negative memories of public events (Studies 1 and 2), private events (Study 3), music-related events (Study 4), and cross-cultural memory differences (i.e., China and US) (Study 5). Participants retrieved either one positive or one negative memory, indicated their Age of Encoding, and provided secondary measures, i.e., memory vividness and rehearsal (Studies 1 and 3) and emotional intensity (Studies 2 and 4). About 10,000 memories were collected and positive memories appeared generally older than negative recollections, but the RB emerged for both positive and negative memories. Furthermore, the peak was earlier for positive memories of public events (<15 years old) than for negative memories (20-40 years), while no differences were found for private events or music-related experiences (15-25 years). Chinese had their RB later than US respondents. Finally, autobiographical recollections have moderate to low associations with secondary measures of phenomenological features of memory. These findings are consistent with the identity-formation theory, providing additional and important information on the development of the Self.

Primacy (and recency) effects in delayed recognition of items from instances of repeated events

In repeated-event paradigms where participants are asked to recall details of a sequence of similar instances they viewed/experienced previously, more accurate details are typically recalled from the first and final instances (i.e., long-term primacy and recency effects). Participants likely encode distinct attributes of details of the boundary instances that subsequently facilitate source monitoring. To date, most repeated event research has measured memory performance via free-/cued-recall paradigms; we examined delayed memory for repeated events using the recognition paradigm. In two preregistered experiments, participants viewed four videos, and after a delay completed a recognition task. In Experiment 1 (N = 168, between-subjects), participants decided whether an item was old (i.e., presented in any video) or new, or whether an item was presented in video 1/2/3/4 or was new. In Experiment 2 (N = 160, within-subjects), the old/new decision was followed by an instance attribution decision. Old items were recognised faster in the old/new task compared to the instance-attribution task. In the instance-attribution task, items from the boundary instances were accurately attributed faster compared to items from the middle instances. We found further evidence for primacy (and recency) effects in measures of confidence, memory judgments, recognition accuracy and discriminability, and confidence-accuracy calibration.

The stability of life script and life story events of Nigerian young adults across religion and gender

The cultural life scripts are shared semantic knowledge of the expected life course in a given culture characterised by a bump for positive events in the second and third life decades, but none for negative events [Berntsen, D., & Rubin, D. C. (2004). Cultural life scripts structure recall from autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 32, 427-442. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195836]. We investigated the stability of Nigerian young adults' life scripts and life stories across religion and gender. One-hundred-and-seventy-four participants completed the life script and life story tasks, and the revised religious orientation scale. We found that the life scripts and life stories consisted of mainly positive events with a reminiscence bump located in the 10s and 20s; however, we also found a small bump for negative events. There was a high mention rate of religion-specific events in both the life scripts and life stories of participants across religion and gender. The level of religiosity had effects on the importance ratings of the life scripts and life stories. In sum, despite minor variations, the life scripts and life stories were consistent across religion and gender.

The COVID-19 pandemic as autobiographical period: evidence from an event dating study

The COVID-19 Pandemic is undoubtedly one of the most impactful and ubiquitous public events in recent history. In this study, we focused on how it affected the organisation of autobiographical memory by examining how often individuals referred to the COVID-19 Pandemic while estimating the date of their autobiographical memories. To that end, we collected word-cued memories from the recent past, event dating protocols, COVID-relatedness ratings, and the transitional impact scores from first-year undergraduates. We found that participants frequently recalled COVID-related memories, and often used the Pandemic as a temporal landmark for dating both COVID-related and unrelated memories. Importantly, reference to the Pandemic in dating estimates was as frequent as the references to other important life periods (high school, university). Despite affecting the lives of these individuals only moderately in psychological and material terms, these data indicate that the Pandemic has become a prominent landmark in autobiographical memory, shaping the way we remember and situate past experiences.

The flashbulb-like nature of memory for the first COVID-19 case and the impact of the emergency. A cross-national survey

Flashbulb memories (FBMs) refer to vivid and long-lasting autobiographical memories for the circumstances in which people learned of a shocking and consequential public event. A cross-national study across eleven countries aimed to investigate FBM formation following the first COVID-19 case news in each country and test the effect of pandemic-related variables on FBM. Participants had detailed memories of the date and others present when they heard the news, and had partially detailed memories of the place, activity, and news source. China had the highest FBM specificity. All countries considered the COVID-19 emergency as highly significant at both the individual and global level. The Classification and Regression Tree Analysis revealed that FBM specificity might be influenced by participants' age, subjective severity (assessment of COVID-19 impact in each country and relative to others), residing in an area with stringent COVID-19 protection measures, and expecting the pandemic effects. Hierarchical regression models demonstrated that age and subjective severity negatively predicted FBM specificity, whereas sex, pandemic impact expectedness, and rehearsal showed positive associations in the total sample. Subjective severity negatively affected FBM specificity in Turkey, whereas pandemic impact expectedness positively influenced FBM specificity in China and negatively in Denmark.

Self- and other-focused autobiographical memories of life story events across cultures

Autobiographical memory and personal life stories are typically conceived as memories about the self. However, personal life stories often contain information about important events from other people's lives. Sometimes those memories become an important part of our own life stories, illuminating the role that other people play in remembering our personal past. In this study, we examined the extent to which memories of important life story events are self-focused (e.g., I moved to Japan) or other-focused (e.g., My child graduated from college). Participants from Mexico, Greenland, China, Denmark and the United States recalled and dated seven autobiographical memories of important personal life story events. Participants also rated the memories for importance and emotional valence. The memories were coded as self- or other-focused. Participants recalled mainly self-focused memories. However, Danish and Chinese participants recalled about 20% other-focused memories. Danish participants recalled negative events about their parents, whereas Chinese participants recalled positive events about their children. Self-focused and other-focused memories differed in their emotional valence and lifespan distribution, but not in importance. The findings show that individuals remember other-focused memories and also incorporate them into their own personal life stories. Conceptual implications for autobiographical memory are discussed.

Investigating traumatic memory integration in people with and without post-traumatic stress disorder using the event-cueing paradigm

Poor integration and landmark views make opposing claims regarding the relationship between post-traumatic stress symptoms and trauma memory integration. This study tested these approaches using an event cluster paradigm. In total, 126 participants (Nptsd = 61; Nnon-ptsd = 65) remembered memories from the same story as trauma, positive and neutral memories and reported whether each memory was directly retrieved or generated. Moreover, the retrieval time (RT) was recorded. Finally, the participants completed the Centrality of Event Scale (CES) and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Scale-Self Report (PSS-SR). The results demonstrated that participants with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recalled their clusters of memories more slowly and less directly than those without PTSD. However, the CES predicted PTSD severity more strongly than RT and retrieval strategy. These results suggest that traumatic memories are more disorganised but perceived as more central in PTSD.

Adults' memories of childhood cluster in the year of a residential move

ABSTRACTWhen adults are asked to recall personal past events, transitional episodes occurring in late adolescence and early adulthood are especially likely to be remembered. In addition, recent research has shown that older adults' memories of middle adulthood tend to cluster around the transitional event of moving to a new residence. In the present research, adults recalled five memories of events that occurred between ages 7 and 13, and they subsequently identified family moves that occurred during the same age interval. As hypothesised, participants' event memories were over-represented in the year of their most important childhood move. Memory clustering was enhanced for moves that were linked retrospectively to other salient coinciding events (e.g., a parental divorce). The results provide additional support for the idea that prominent life transitions provide an organising structure for autobiographical memory.

Autobiographical memory and the self: A transition theory perspective

In contrast to much theoretical work on the topic, Transition Theory (Brown, 2016, 2021) attempts to account for important aspects of autobiographical memory in a way that emphasizes the structure of experience, rather than the relation between personal-event memories and the Self. This article provides the rationale for adopting this minimalist stance. Here it is argued that: (a) an all-inclusive notion of the Self is of little utility to the study of autobiographical memory because virtually all sentient goal-directed activities can be seen as reflecting the Self, hence, adopting this view provides no bias for predicting event memorability; (b) although some event memories are clearly Self-relevant (e.g., life-story events, turning points, self-defining memories), most are not; (c) the formation of and access to Self-knowledge typically does not depend on the availability of specific autobiographical memories; rather, (d) Self-knowledge is generally derived from massive amounts of readily forgotten role-relevant experience. This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Representation Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief Psychology > Memory.

Sources and destinations of misattributions in recall of instances of repeated events

Repeated experience of events promotes schema formation. Later activation of the schema facilitates recall of the general structure of the events, whereas attribution of details to instances requires systematic decision-making based on detail characteristics. For repeated events, source monitoring may be less effective due to the similarity and interference of details across instances and consequently result in source attribution errors. To date, researchers have examined aggregated misattributions across instances and have found that misattributions are more frequent in the middle than in the boundary instances. In this study, we investigated the trajectories of misattributions using data from six studies (N = 633), where participants recalled repeated interactive marketing-themed events (Study 1), mock-crime filmed events (Study 2), stories (Study 3), and categorized word lists (Studies 4-6). The patterns confirmed the expected primacy and recency effects, showing fewer misattributions from and to the boundary instances relative to the middle instances. In addition, the patterns indicated proximity effects: Confusions more frequently occurred across adjacent instances and gradually decreased for instances that were further apart from the source. Our findings suggest that detail characteristics that form the basis of source attribution decisions provide information about the relative position of instances in repeated events, where the boundary instances serve as anchors, and where confusion relatively easily occurs across neighbouring instances. In line with context-based models of memory, our findings indicate that a higher-level organization of repeated events that emerges at encoding guides retrieval and source monitoring decisions.

Jacques PL. The influence of shifting perspective on episodic and semantic details during autobiographical memory recall

Shifting to a novel visual perspective during retrieval influences autobiographical memories (AM) and can lead to persistent changes in memories. Adopting an observer-like compared to an own eyes perspective reduces episodic information during AM recall, but less is known regarding how viewpoint influences semantic information. In the current study, we investigated how shifting from an own eyes to an observer-like perspective during narrative recall of AMs influences episodic and semantic information. Shifting perspective reduced the number of episodic details associated with emotions and thoughts, and also led to similar reductions in personal semantics. We replicated prior research showing that shifting perspective reduces emotional intensity in subsequent memories, but these subjective changes were not coupled with objective changes in a narrative recall. Our findings suggest that shifting perspective influences the interplay between episodic and semantic information during proximate recall and subjective changes when memories are later recalled.

Stability and change in the organisation of collective memory representations

In this study, we investigated the impact of a highly consequential public event, the July 15 Coup Attempt, on the structure and organisation of events in Turkish collective memory. To do this, we followed up on our earlier work (Mutlutürk, Tekcan, & Boduroglu, 2021) that used the multidimensional scaling approach to identify critical dimensions in public event representational space. Participants rated the similarity of 15 key public events in a pairwise fashion, across three waves of data collection. They were also asked to report for which political party they had voted in the most recent election. We replicated our earlier results that public events were distinguished based on their political and nonpolitical characteristics; political events were clustered based on their specific attributes. Despite substantial stability in the organisation of collective memories across three time points, the post-coup representational space among voters of the ruling party changed, eliminating clusters within the political dimension and resulting in the ruling party achieving a central and anchor status. These findings suggest that, transformative events may have the potential to impact the structure and organisation of collective memory representations and sociopolitical identity may have to do with the stability of collective memories.

How do we recall the story of our lives? Evidence for a temporal order in the recall of important life story events

Based on the chronological nature of extensive life narratives, in two studies, we investigated whether a temporal order can also be found for the retrieval of important life story events. The data of Study 1 come from 52 older adults (M_age = 70.35, SD_age = 6.09) who reported seven important events from their life. We used multilevel analysis to take into account the hierarchical structure of the data but also to investigate individual differences. Results showed a significant temporal order effect which considerably differed between persons. In further exploratory analyses using group-based modelling, we identified three groups that differed in the direction (i.e., forward and backward) and in the size of the temporal order effect. The use of life scripts was not associated with a forward temporal order. Study 2 was conceptualised as a replication study and included 88 participants (M_age = 68.60, SD_age = 6.63) who recalled up to 15 important life events. The temporal order effect, as well as the three trajectories of temporarily ordering important life story events, were replicated. Again, the use of life script was not associated with a forward ordered recall. Potential explanations for a forward and backward temporal recall order are discussed.

Living-in-history effect in the dating of important autobiographical memories

The tendency of a person to frequently use public (i.e., historical) events as temporal landmarks when dating personal memories is termed the living-in-history (LiH) effect. We investigated the LiH effect in autobiographical memories of Bangladeshi older adults who lived through the 1960s Bengali nationalist movement and the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence. 476 participants (mean age = 67.16 years; SD = 5.96 years), including 62 independence war veterans, retrieved and dated three important memories from their life and completed two scales: (a) a transitional impact-of-war scale and (b) a generational identity scale. Results showed that nearly one-third of the total memories (32%) were dated using public event references, demonstrating a LiH effect. However, this effect was twice as strong among veterans (58%) than among nonveterans (28%). The memory content analysis revealed that public event references were mostly used to date public memories (e.g., war and political struggle) and the memories with negative valence. Multivariate analyses showed that veteran identity, material changes due to war and participants’ age significantly predicted the use of public event references to date one, two or three memories relative to no use of those references. The public memories that were personally significant and the extent participants experienced the material changes due to war mainly caused the LiH effect. We discuss the results considering current theories of autobiographical memory.

Exploring People's Reaction and Perceived Issues of the COVID-19 Pandemic at Its Onset

The experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic has varied considerably from individual-to-individual. Little is known about the changes in the level of experience general people went through during the first few months after the coronavirus (COVID-19) was declared as a Pandemic. This longitudinal qualitative study explores the general public’s reports of their experience with the COVID-19 Pandemic during its early stage. An online survey was conducted using a convenience/snowball sampling technique in March and again in May 2020, where North American adults with at least a college-degree, and female majority, shared their experiences with the COVID-19 Pandemic in response to an open-ended question, apart from completing questionnaires assessing transitional impact and psychological well-being. Open responses were first content analyzed to identify themes most commonly reported, and then, the quantitative analysis examined the reliability of the changes of themes between the two-time points. Text-analysis of the open-responses from the two waves identified seven themes, namely emotional response, social contact, virus-infected, financial impact, impact on plans, disease, and non-disease related concern, as well as social-distance. These themes indicated that, (a) people were distressed and having negative affective thoughts; (b) they spoke more about their plans-and-goals that were affected by the Pandemic than their financial condition; (c) people mostly used digital platforms to maintain contact with their social network, although they preferred face-to-face interactions; (d) they spoke more about the infection experienced by people in general than infection experienced by themselves and individuals they know. Surprisingly, (e) people mentioned more about the way the Pandemic had disrupted their day-to-day activities than the disease-related health concern. Finally, (f) most of the respondents approved of the practice of social distancing while some expressed its negative or neutral effect on their social lives. The quantitative measure determined that as time passed, people’s experience with the Pandemic became quite different as people talked more about getting infected, and their affected goals-and-plans. We concluded with a remark that this Pandemic would most likely leave an impression on people’s lives and that these online comment-style responses might provide us with insights into people’s perspectives as the Pandemic unfolds, helping us in understanding the uniqueness of the Pandemic experience of individuals for an effective tailored intervention to protect their well-being during a health-crisis.

Beliefs About Transitional Events: The Effect of Experience and Life-Script Consistency

The present study examined the beliefs about two types of important life transitions: transitions that are consistent with the cultural life script (e.g., getting married) and transitions that diverge from it (e.g., relocating). Data were collected from two conditions: individuals in the experienced condition only responded to transitions they had experienced; individuals in the hypothetical condition provided ratings only for transitions they had not experienced. Participants rated the likelihood and typical age of occurrence, importance, transitional impact, and valence for an individualized set of condition-appropriate events. We found that script-consistent events were considered more normative and positive than script-divergent events. The two types of events, however, differed little in terms of importance or transitional impact. We conclude by arguing that although script-consistent and script-divergent transitions have much in common from a mnemonic perspective, the distinction is still warranted in the context of lifetime planning and evaluation.

The possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the contents and organization of autobiographical memory: A Transition-Theory perspective

The COVID-19 Pandemic is unique in its near universal scope and in the way that it has changed our lives. These facts suggest that it might also be unique in its effects on memory. A framework outlined in this article, Transition Theory, is used to explicate the mnemonically relevant ways in which the onset of the Pandemic differs from other personal and collective transitions and how the Pandemic Period might differ from other personally-defined and historically-defined autobiographical periods. Transition Theory also provides the basis for several predictions. Specifically, it predicts (a) a COVID bump (an increase in availability of event memories at the outset of the Pandemic) followed by (b) a lockdown dip (a decrease in availability of event memories from lockdown periods compared to other stable periods). It also predicts that (c) people may consider the Pandemic an important chapter in their life stories, but only when there is little continuity between their pre-Pandemic and post-Pandemic lives. Time will tell whether these predictions pan out. However, it is not too soon to highlight those aspects of the COVID-19 Pandemic that are likely to shape our personal and collective memories of this very unusual historical period.

Assessing the Transitional Impact and Mental Health Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic Onset

In this article, we report the results of a survey of North American adults (n = 1,215) conducted between March 24 and 30, 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents completed the COVID-TIS (Transitional Impact Scale-Pandemic version) and the 21-item Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS), indicated their level of COVID-infection concern for themselves and close others, and provided demographic information. The results indicated: (a) during its early stage, the pandemic produced only moderate levels of material and psychological change; (b) the pandemic produced mild to moderate levels of psychological distress; (c) respondents who lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic experienced more change and more psychological distress than those who did not, and (d) younger respondents and less well-educated ones experienced more psychological distress than older respondents. Unexpectedly, (e) respondents indicated that they were more concerned that friends and family members would become infected with COVID-19 than that they would be. We conclude by speculating that these results are driven less by the immediate changes brought about by the pandemic and more by uncertainty concerning its long-term economic and social impact.

Schema and deviation effects in remembering repeated unfamiliar stories

In today's globalized world, we frequently encounter unfamiliar events that we may have difficulty comprehending - and in turn remembering - due to a lack of appropriate schemata. This research investigated schema effects in a situation where participants established a complex new schema for an unfamiliar type of story through exposure to four variations. We found that immediate recall increased across subsequent stories and that distortions occurred less frequently - participants built on the emerging schema and gradually established representations of parts of the story that were initially transformed. In recall with delays increasing up to 1 month, quantitative measures indicated forgetting while distortions increased. The second focus of this research was on content and order deviation effects on recall. The content deviation, in contrast with previous repeated-event research, was not remembered well and was associated with lower recall; the order deviation had a similar (but expected) effect. We discuss discrepancies between results of this study and previous literature, which had focused on schemata for familiar events, in relation to stages of schema development: it seems that in unfamiliar repeated events, a complex new schema is in the early stages of formation, where the lack of attentional resources limits active processing of deviations.

Zooming In and Out on One's Life: Autobiographical Representations at Multiple Time Scales

The ability to decouple from the present environment and explore other times is a central feature of the human mind. Research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience has shown that the personal past and future is represented at multiple timescales and levels of resolution, from broad lifetime periods that span years to short-time slices of experience that span seconds. Here, I review this evidence and propose a theoretical framework for understanding mental time travel as the capacity to flexibly navigate hierarchical layers of autobiographical representations. On this view, past and future thoughts rely on two main systems-event simulation and autobiographical knowledge-that allow us to represent experiential contents that are decoupled from sensory input and to place these on a personal timeline scaffolded from conceptual knowledge of the content and structure of our life. The neural basis of this cognitive architecture is discussed, emphasizing the possible role of the medial pFC in integrating layers of autobiographical representations in the service of mental time travel.

Representing the collective past: public event memories and future simulations in Turkey

Common processes involved in remembering and predicting personal and public events have led researchers to study public events as a part of autobiographical memory. In the present study, we asked for past events and future predictions and examined the temporal distribution and factors that made these salient in event representations. A sample of 1577 individuals reported six most important public events since their birth and six future events that they expected. Past events mostly came from the recent past and were negative in valence. Similarly, future predictions consisted of negative events that are expected to occur in the near past. We did not find a reminiscence bump but there was a strong recency effect. Despite being inconsistent with some literature, this supports the view that remembering the past is largely influenced by the current goals and experiences. Also, in predicting what is remembered from the past and what is expected in the future, what individuals believed others would report appeared as a robust predictor.

Lives as Collections of Strands: An Essay in Descriptive Psychology

In this article I generalize the notion of multiple self-aspects to create a descriptive framework in which lives are partitioned into containers of activities called strands. Strands are nearly decomposable life modules, structured, stable, and concurrent longitudinal streams of extended duration whose momentary cross-sections constitute self-aspects. They are differentiated by five features: the person's role, the cast, the setting, norms and values, and habits and routines. Strands contain projects and episodes and are replete with narrative. Each strand is continuous (i.e., strands persist when a person moves between them), and for the most part strands are mutually asynchronous. From a first-person perspective, the strands are continuous and concurrent, but only one strand is in the foreground at a given time (i.e., transitions between strands are akin to a figure-ground reversal). Furthermore, a life is different from the sum of its strands: It is a nonlinear system that can take on configurations not predictable from a comprehensive description of the individual strands. Two such examples are the achievement of greatness despite severe handicaps and instances of extreme self-sacrifice. I also discuss the research potential of a proposed smartphone app called LifeMaps.

Factors that modulate the intergenerational transmission of autobiographical memory from older to younger generations

The present study examined the intergenerational factors in transmitting autobiographical memories from one generation to the next. Older adults from Beijing, China reported a collection of personally important autobiographical memories and their middle-aged children recalled important parental memories. The parent-child dyads independently recalled and provided ratings of mnemonic characteristics for the memories. Across generations, consensus memories, which refer to the memories that both parents and children considered as important in the parent's life, were characterised by the substantial material change that the events brought about in their lives. While parent-child interaction affected the number of events passed onto children, it only affected the number of script-divergent events that were not recorded in the life script of a culture, but not the number of script-consistent events. In addition, children whose parents were rusticated and relocated to rural areas during the Cultural Revolution remembered more historical memories than children whose parents were not rusticated. The findings shed light on the process that one generation gains the biographical knowledge and historical experience of a prior generation. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Event centrality, transitional impact and symptoms of posttraumatic stress in a clinical sample

Background and Objectives: There is growing research indicating that event centrality strongly predicts posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, there is not much research on what makes a traumatic event central to one's life story. One reason a traumatic memory becomes a reference point for one's life story is that it brings about significant changes in one's life. This study investigated the relationships between transitional impact of an event, event centrality, and PTSD symptoms. Specifically, it tested whether higher negative changes were associated with higher levels of event centrality and PTSD symptoms. It also investigated whether event centrality mediated the relationship between transitional impact and PTSD severity.Methods: 101 individuals diagnosed with PTSD completed the Transitional Impact Scale (TIS), Centrality of Event Scale, and Impact of Event Scale-Revised regarding their traumatic experiences. Furthermore, they responded to the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptom Scale-Self Report (PSS-SR), Traumatic Events Checklist (TELC), and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI).Results and Conclusions: Results indicate that (a) the TIS had valid and reliable psychometric properties in a PTSD sample, (b) most of the traumatic events received high negative psychological and material change scores, and (c) event centrality mediated the relationship between transitional impact and PTSD severity.

How is physiological arousal related to self-reported measures of emotional intensity and valence of events and their autobiographical memories?

Research suggests that emotionally intense experiences that elicit higher-than-average physiological arousal responses lead to particularly durable and detailed autobiographical memories. Yet, the lack of objective measures of physiological arousal while events unfold in everyday life makes it hard to corroborate this lab finding. Also, it is uncertain how well arousal maps onto self-reports of the phenomenological characteristics of autobiographical events and memories. Here, we examined how physiological measures of arousal, taken while everyday life events develop, correlate with self-reports. Our results showed that physiological arousal during an event not only was related to self-evaluations of its assessed physical reaction -at the time of report-, but also predicted evaluations of physical reaction, positivity, and importance of their memories one week after. Further analyses revealed that, while arousal affected evaluations of emotional intensity of events and memories, this relationship was moderated by participants' level of awareness about their own emotional processes.

A positive Living-in-History effect: the case of the fall of the Berlin Wall

Research has shown that individuals use a combination of cultural life script events and historical events when dating personal memories, providing evidence for a cultural life script effect and Living-in-History (LiH) effect on the temporal organisation of autobiographical memory. Yet, in contrast to life script events, the LiH effect has only been found for negative events such as war or natural disasters. Therefore, this study tested whether a positive historical event, here the fall of the Berlin Fall, also elicits a LiH effect and whether this effect would differ due to the subsequent changes in life. Comparing West and East Germans, we found a moderate LiH effect for the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germans but not in West Germans. Yet, the LiH effect in East Germans did not relate to the perceived change in life or the valence of the historical event. Additionally, this study replicated the finding that life script events serve as temporal landmarks when navigating through one's autobiographical timeline.

The effects of collective and personal transitions on the organization and contents of autobiographical memory in older Chinese adults

Life transitions like war, marriage, and immigration presumably organize autobiographical memory. Yet little is known about how the magnitude of a given transition affects this mnemonic impact. To examine this issue, we collected (a) word-cued events, (b) event-dating protocols, (c) personally important events, and (d) transitional impact scores of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and important events from Chinese adults who had been adolescents during the revolution. There were three main findings. First, rusticated participants, who moved from cities to rural areas during the Cultural Revolution, dated autobiographical memories in relation to this collective transition more frequently than nonrusticated participants, with the former group reporting a greater material (but not psychological) change in their lives due to this collective transition than the latter group. Second, material change predicted the degree to which the self-nominated important events served as temporal landmarks in event dating. Third, we observed that the events that people typically considered important and those that typically served as temporal landmarks changed as a function of age but displayed the similar temporal distributions. We conclude by considering the theoretical implications of these findings.

Reconstructing the times of past and future personal events

Humans have the remarkable ability to mentally travel through past and future times. However, while memory for the times of past events has been much investigated, little is known about how imagined future events are temporally located. Using a think-aloud protocol, we found that the temporal location of past and future events is rarely directly accessed, but instead mostly relies on reconstructive and inferential strategies. References to lifetime periods and factual knowledge (about the self, others, and the world) were most frequently used to determine the temporal location of both past and future events. Event details (e.g., places, persons, or weather conditions) were also used, but mainly for past events. Finally, the results showed that events whose temporal location was directly accessed were judged more important for personal goals. Together, these findings shed new light on the mechanisms involved in locating personal events in past and future times.

The effect of cue content on retrieval from autobiographical memory

It has long been argued that personal memories are usually generated in an effortful search process in word-cueing studies. However, recent research (Uzer, Lee, & Brown, 2012) shows that direct retrieval of autobiographical memories, in response to word cues, is common. This invites the question of whether direct retrieval phenomenon is generalizable beyond the standard laboratory paradigm. Here we investigated prevalence of direct retrieval of autobiographical memories cued by specific and individuated cues versus generic cues. In Experiment 1, participants retrieved memories in response to cues from their own life (e.g., the names of friends) and generic words (e.g., chair). In Experiment 2, participants provided their personal cues two or three months prior to coming to the lab (min: 75days; max: 100days). In each experiment, RT was measured and participants reported whether memories were directly retrieved or generated on each trial. Results showed that personal cues elicited a high rate of direct retrieval. Personal cues were more likely to elicit direct retrieval than generic word cues, and as a consequence, participants responded faster, on average, to the former than to the latter. These results challenge the constructive view of autobiographical memory and suggest that autobiographical memories consist of pre-stored event representations, which are largely governed by associative mechanisms. These demonstrations offer theoretically interesting questions such as why are we not overwhelmed with directly retrieved memories cued by everyday familiar surroundings?