Memory for autobiographical facts and events: a comparison of women reporting childhood sexual abuse and non‐abused controls

Although there is evidence that many adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) have a period when they forget their abuse, existing research is equivocal about whether such individuals show other autobiographical memory impairments. The present study addressed some of the sampling and measurement problems apparent in previous studies and compared 74 women reporting a history of CSA with 60 non‐abused controls on their ability to recall facts and events from childhood. The results showed that the CSA group did not differ from the controls in the quality of their memories for autobiographical incidents. However, they were significantly less able than controls to recall specific facts about their personal history, such as significant addresses and names of significant individuals, after controlling for educational level, depression and childhood address changes. CSA group participants reporting a period of abuse forgetting appeared more impaired than those with continuous abuse memories in their recall of personal semantic facts, but were similar in their recall of autobiographical incidents. The findings suggest that experiencing a period of abuse forgetting is a more influential factor in predicting the ability to recall personal semantic facts than abuse status alone. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ordering autobiographical experiences

This study examined individuals' memory for the temporal order of autobiographical events and for the components that constitute autobiographical events. Study 1 measured performance on an across-event ordering task that involved the chronological arrangement of cards that displayed event labels. Results indicated poor ordering ability across events, but a reasonable ability to order clusters of events. Study 2 compared within-event and across-event ordering using computer-presented digital photographs. Participants were better at ordering the photographs in their own across-event trials than in their within-event trials. The results are discussed in terms of the retrieval of temporal information under within- and across-event conditions.     

Verifying environmental relationships

In two experiments, subjects first learned the locations of objects in a 21 x 21 ft room and then were timed as they verified, from memory, statements about the spatial relationships of the objects to certain features (e.g., the outside walls, the center of the room, subdividing partitions). The statements were of the form “X is (not) close to (far from) F” in Experiment 1 and “X is farther from (closer to) F than Y is” in Experiment 2, where X and Y are specific objects and F is a feature. While some of the latencies varied directly with the magnitudes of the distances between objects and features named in the sentences, there were several instances in which sentences associated with equivalent distances led to different latencies or sentences associated with different distances led to equivalent latencies. The possible cognitive operations underlying the latency pattern are discussed.     

Assessing autobiographical memory: the web-based autobiographical Implicit Association Test

By assessing the association strength with TRUE and FALSE, the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) [Sartori, G., Agosta, S., Zogmaister, C., Ferrara, S. D., &; Castiello, U. (2008). How to accurately detect autobiographical events. Psychological Science, 19, 772–780. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02156.x] aims to determine which of two contrasting statements is true. To efficiently run well-powered aIAT experiments, we propose a web-based aIAT (web-aIAT). Experiment 1 (n?=?522) is a web-based replication study of the first published aIAT study [Sartori, G., Agosta, S., Zogmaister, C., Ferrara, S. D., &; Castiello, U. (2008). How to accurately detect autobiographical events. Psychological Science, 19, 772–780. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02156.x; Experiment 1]. We conclude that the replication was successful as the web-based aIAT could accurately detect which of two playing cards participants chose (AUC?=?.88; Hit rate?=?81%). In Experiment 2 (n?=?424), we investigated whether the use of affirmative versus negative sentences may partly explain the variability in aIAT accuracy findings. The aIAT could detect the chosen card when using affirmative (AUC?=?.90; Hit rate?=?81%), but not when using negative sentences (AUC?=?.60; Hit rate?=?53%). The web-based aIAT seems to be a valuable tool to facilitate aIAT research and may help to further identify moderators of the test’s accuracy.     

Sampling autobiographical memory

An empirical procedure for probing autobiographical memory was assessed. Words designating common objects, activities, and feelings were used as guides for recall of discrete experiences. Four properties of the recollections were assessed: latency, age of occurrence, temporal specificity of memory report, and type of experience. The three results of most general interest were: (1) consistent differences in properties of reports elicited by affect terms and those elicited by object and activity words; (2) a curvilinear relationship between latency and event age; and (3) reliable sex differences. Several proposals regarding the organization of autobiographical memory, and voluntary recall of personal experiences are discussed.     

Stability in autobiographical memories

A total of 30 undergraduates recalled the same 20 autobiographical memories at two sessions separated by 2 weeks. At each session they dated their memories and rated them on 18 properties commonly studied in autobiographical memory experiments. Individuals showed moderate stability in their ratings on the 18 scales (r approximately .5), with consistency of dating being much higher (r = .96). There was more stability in the individuals' average rating on each scale (r approximately .8), even when the averages were calculated on different memories in the different sessions. The results are consistent with a constructive view of autobiographical memory, in which stable individual differences in cognitive style are important.     

Regret as autobiographical memory

We apply an autobiographical memory framework to the study of regret. Focusing on the distinction between regrets for specific and general events we argue that the temporal profile of regret, usually explained in terms of the action–inaction distinction, is predicted by models of autobiographical memory. In two studies involving participants in their sixties we demonstrate a reminiscence bump for general, but not for specific regrets. Recent regrets were more likely to be specific than general in nature. Coding regrets as actions/inactions revealed that general regrets were significantly more likely to be due to inaction while specific regrets were as likely to be due to action as to inaction. In Study 2 we also generalised all of these findings to a group of participants in their 40s. We re-interpret existing accounts of the temporal profile of regret within the autobiographical memory framework, and outline the practical and theoretical advantages of our memory-based distinction over traditional decision-making approaches to the study of regret.     

The unpredictable past: spontaneous autobiographical memories outnumber autobiographical memories retrieved strategically

Involuntary autobiographical memories are spontaneously arising memories of personal events, whereas voluntary memories are retrieved strategically. Voluntary remembering has been studied in numerous experiments while involuntary remembering has been largely ignored. It is generally assumed that voluntary recall is the standard way of remembering, whereas involuntary recall is the exception. However, little is known about the actual frequency of these two types of remembering in daily life. Here, 48 Danish undergraduates recorded their involuntary versus voluntary autobiographical memories during a day using a mechanical counter. Involuntary memories were reported three times as frequently as voluntary memories. Compared to voluntary memories, they were associated less with problem solving and social sharing and more with day dreaming, periods of boredom, no reasons for remembering and predominantly came to mind during unfocused attention. The findings suggest that involuntary recall is a typical way of accessing the personal past.     

When autobiographical memory begins

The authors review competing theories concerning the emergence and early development of autobiographical memory. It is argued that the differences between these accounts, although important, may be more apparent than real. The crux of these disagreements lies not in what processes are important, but rather, the role these different processes play in the emergence of autobiographical memory and the temporal primacy of these controlling variables. These differences are explored theoretically and then extant as well as new data are brought to bear on these issues. What emerges is a new, more inclusive, multifactorial framework that integrates the controlling variables from diverse perspectives providing a more complete account of the beginnings of autobiographical memory.     

Organization in autobiographical memory

Three experiments investigated timed autobiographical memory retrieval to cue words and phrases. In the first experiment, subjects retrieved memories to cues that named semantic category members and were primed with the superordinate category name or with a neutral word. No prime effects were observed. In the second experiment, subjects retrieved memories to primed and unprimed semantic category cues and to personal primes and personal history cues. Personal primes named lifetime periods (e.g., “school days”) and personal history cues named general events occurring in those lifetime periods for each subject (e.g., “holiday in Italy”). Only personal primes were found to significantly facilitate memory retrieval. A third experiment replicated this finding and also failed to find any prime effects to primes and cues naming activities not directly related to an individual’s personal history. In this experiment, characteristics of recalled events (e.g,, personal importance, frequency of rehearsal, pleasantness, and specificity of the memory) were found to be strongly associated with memories retrieved to personal cues and only mildly associated with memories retrieved to other types of cues. These findings suggest that one way in which autobiographical memories may be organized is in terms of a hierarchically structured abstracted personal history.     

Priming involuntary autobiographical memories

Involuntary autobiographical memories occur frequently in daily life and are usually triggered by cues in one's environment. This study investigated the possibility that priming plays a role in the production of involuntary memories. In Study 1, participants recorded their involuntary memories in a diary for 14 days and then completed a questionnaire assessing their cognitive activity during the recording period. Participants indicating frequent thought about significant others on the questionnaire showed significantly more involuntary memories related to such individuals than a control group. In Studies 2 and 3, participants recorded their involuntary memories in diaries for 14 days and were primed with recall sessions in the laboratory during that period (recalling episodes from high school, Study 1, the past year, or ages 13-16, Studies 2 & 3). The results of both studies showed significant priming effects in the involuntary memories of participants for all of the periods primed. The possibility that priming plays a significant role in the daily production of involuntary memories is discussed.     

Regret as autobiographical memory

We apply an autobiographical memory framework to the study of regret. Focusing on the distinction between regrets for specific and general events we argue that the temporal profile of regret, usually explained in terms of the action–inaction distinction, is predicted by models of autobiographical memory. In two studies involving participants in their sixties we demonstrate a reminiscence bump for general, but not for specific regrets. Recent regrets were more likely to be specific than general in nature. Coding regrets as actions/inactions revealed that general regrets were significantly more likely to be due to inaction while specific regrets were as likely to be due to action as to inaction. In Study 2 we also generalised all of these findings to a group of participants in their 40s. We re-interpret existing accounts of the temporal profile of regret within the autobiographical memory framework, and outline the practical and theoretical advantages of our memory-based distinction over traditional decision-making approaches to the study of regret.     

Priming involuntary autobiographical memories

Involuntary autobiographical memories occur frequently in daily life and are usually triggered by cues in one's environment. This study investigated the possibility that priming plays a role in the production of involuntary memories. In Study 1, participants recorded their involuntary memories in a diary for 14 days and then completed a questionnaire assessing their cognitive activity during the recording period. Participants indicating frequent thought about significant others on the questionnaire showed significantly more involuntary memories related to such individuals than a control group. In Studies 2 and 3, participants recorded their involuntary memories in diaries for 14 days and were primed with recall sessions in the laboratory during that period (recalling episodes from high school, Study 1, the past year, or ages 13–16, Studies 2 & 3). The results of both studies showed significant priming effects in the involuntary memories of participants for all of the periods primed. The possibility that priming plays a significant role in the daily production of involuntary memories is discussed.     

Recall of autobiographical events

The clarity with which events that happened 6 years earlier can be recalled was estimated. The estimates are consistent with a gradual degradation rather than a precipitate decline of memory, and with the proposition that once an event cannot be recalled then it will remain inaccessible under similar conditions of cueing. Rare events are recalled well, suggesting that proactive interference has a strong influence on difficulty to recall. Vivid events are recalled well, also, but other dimensions such as importance of the event, its association with semantic knowledge, and the intensity of physical sensation are not related to recallability. Memory for the date of an event is poor, but for its time of day is good.     

Temporal necessity; Hard facts/soft facts

Conclusion In conclusion, then, the notion of temporal necessity is certainly queer and perhaps a misnomer. It really has little to do with temporality per se and everything to do with counterfactual openness or closedness. We have seen that the future is as unalterable as the past, but that this purely logical truth is not antithetical to freedom or contingency. Moreover, we have found certain past facts are counterfactually open in that were future events or actualities to be other than they will be, these past facts would have been different as a consequence. God's beliefs about the future are such past facts. Moreover, the effects of actions which God would have taken had He believed differently are also such past facts. Oddly enough, then, virtually any past fact is potentially counterfactually open, and the only necessity that remains is purely de facto. We, of course, do not in general know which events of the past depend counterfactually on present actions, and those cases we do know about seem rather trivial. Our intuitions of the necessity, unalterability, and unpreventability of the past as opposed to the future stem from the impossibility of backward causation, which is precluded by the dynamic nature of time and becoming. But the counterfactual dependence of God's beliefs on future events or actualities is not a case of backward causation: rather future-tense propositions are true in virtue of what will happen, given a view of truth as correspondence, and God simply has the essential property of knowing all and only true propositions. With regard to the future, virtually all facts are counterfactually open, and therefore future-tense propositions are not temporally necessary. Propositions thus move from being temporally contingent to being temporally necessary when all the opportunities to affect things counterfactually have slipped by. Hence, the mere fact that an event is past is no indication that it is counterfactually closed. This is especially evident in the case of God's foreknowledge. If we say that God foreknows that I shall do x and therefore I cannot refrain from doing x, lest I change God's past foreknowledge, we are being deceived by a modality which has nothing to do with my power or freedom. All that is impossible is the conjunction of God's foreknowledge that p and of ~ p; but this modality in sensu composito has no bearing on my ability to act such that ~ p would be true and God would have foreknown differently. Temporal necessity, then, turns out to be only obliquely temporal and modally weak, certainly no threat to freedom or divine foreknowledge.     

Language-dependent recall of autobiographical memories

Two studies of autobiographical memory explored the hypothesis that memories become more accessible when the linguistic environment at retrieval matches the linguistic environment at encoding. In Experiment 1, Russian-English bilinguals were asked to recall specific life experiences in response to word prompts. The results supported the hypothesis of language-dependent recall: Participants retrieved more experiences from the Russian-speaking period of their lives when interviewed in Russian and more experiences from the English-speaking period of their lives when interviewed in English. In Experiment 2, the language of the interview was varied independently from the language of the word prompts. Both variables were found to influence autobiographical recall. These findings show that language at the time of retrieval, like other forms of context, plays a significant role in determining what will be remembered.     

Functional neuroimaging of autobiographical memory

Functional neuroimaging studies of autobiographical memory have grown dramatically in recent years. These studies are important because they can investigate the neural correlates of processes that are difficult to study using laboratory stimuli, including: (i) complex constructive processes, (ii) recollective qualities of emotion and vividness, and (iii) remote memory retrieval. Constructing autobiographical memories involves search, monitoring and self-referential processes that are associated with activity in separable prefrontal regions. The contributions of emotion and vividness have been linked to the amygdala and visual cortex respectively. Finally, there is evidence that recent and remote autobiographical memories might activate the hippocampus equally, which has implications for memory-consolidation theories. The rapid development of innovative methods for eliciting personal memories in the scanner provides the opportunity to delve into the functional neuroanatomy of our personal past.     

Event components in autobiographical memories

Autobiographical memories contain activity, location, temporal, and participant information (Lancaster & Barsalou, 1997). Our study analysed potential dominance of activity information in autobiographical memories. The results indicated stability in dominance of the activity component, defined as similar occurrence in first and subsequent reports, and a relative absence of the temporal component in these verbal reports. Activity dominance also occurred when activity information from the verbal reports was used as a retrieval cue for a subsequent report. Temporal information demonstrated a greater lack of facilitation as a retrieval cue. These findings can be explained from the perspective of embodied cognition in which underlying perceptual states that contain activity, location, and other participant information are reconstructed during retrieval, whereas temporal information, as a more abstract component, is not.     

Characterisation of music-evoked autobiographical memories

Despite music's prominence in Western society and its importance to individuals in their daily lives, very little is known about the memories and emotions that are often evoked when hearing a piece of music from one's past. We examined the content of music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) using a novel approach for selecting stimuli from a large corpus of popular music, in both laboratory and online settings. A set of questionnaires probed the cognitive and affective properties of the evoked memories. On average, 30% of the song presentations evoked autobiographical memories, and the majority of songs also evoked various emotions, primarily positive, that were often felt strongly. The third most common emotion was nostalgia. Analyses of written memory reports found both general and specific levels of autobiographical knowledge to be represented, and several social and situational contexts for memory formation were common across many memories. The findings indicate that excerpts of popular music serve as potent stimuli for studying the structure of autobiographical memories.