Young Children's Memory for the Times of Personal Past Events

Remembering the temporal information associated with personal past events is critical for autobiographical memory, yet we know relatively little about the development of this capacity. In the present research, we investigated temporal memory for naturally occurring personal events in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children. Parents recorded unique events in which their children participated during a 4-month period. At test, children made relative recency judgments and estimated the time of each event using conventional time scales (time of day, day of week, month of year, and season). Children also were asked to provide justifications for their time-scale judgments. Six- and 8-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, accurately judged the order of two distinct events. There were age-related improvements in children's estimation of the time of events using conventional time scales. Older children provided more justifications for their time-scale judgments compared with younger children. Relations between correct responding on the time-scale judgments and provision of meaningful justifications suggest that children may use that information to reconstruct the times associated with past events. The findings can be used to chart a developmental trajectory of performance in temporal memory for personal past events and have implications for our understanding of autobiographical memory development.     

Using Personal Landmark Events Improves Judgments about Time,but not Contents,in Autobiographical Memory

Landmark events are strong memories that function as reference points for other memories. We examined whether people's accuracy in recalling when an earlier target event occurred was related to whether they spontaneously used personal landmark events or not. Participants completed two questionnaires separated by 2‐31 days. In the first, they described a personal event including what happened, who was there, where it was, and when it occurred. In the second questionnaire, they recalled the personal event and specific details. They also described whether they had used landmark events to assist their recall. Overall, participants' memories for temporal and content information faded over time. Spontaneous use of landmark events was associated with an increase in participants’ recall of temporal information but not content information. Analysis of the landmark events revealed that almost two‐thirds were significant events, such as birthdays, parties, and travel‐related events. Applications of the findings are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Personal Uniqueness and Events

Human Studies - In contrast to Anglophone debates on personal identity initially formed by John Locke’s investigation of personal identity in the sense of personal continuity or persistence...     

Contrasting Memory for Temporal-Source and Memory for Content in Children's Discrimination of Repeated Events

The current studies examined the separate roles that memory of temporal-source and memory of content play in children's discrimination of occurrences of a repeated event. The studies were also designed to determine the impact of age and retention interval on each of these components. In Experiment One, 4- to 5- versus 6- to 8-year-old children experienced six occurrences of a repeated event; each occurrence had the same underlying structure; however, a different version or instantiation of each item was included in each occurrence of the event. At either 1 or 6 week delay, the children were asked to recall which instantiation of the item was included in the final occurrence. In Experiment Two, children were required to recall as many instantiations as they could, prior to making a decision about which instantiation was included in the final occurrence. The results indicated that: (a) children's capacity to correctly identify the final instantiation declined over time and increased with age; (b) children's capacity to provide an instantiation that was temporally close to the final occurrence declined over time and increased with age; and (c) children's ability to remember the source of an instantiation decreased over time irrespective of any loss of memory for content. The results were discussed in relation to current theories of memory and children's eyewitness memory. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Memory for the Events of Early Childhood

There has been much recent interest in the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, the difficulty most adults have in recalling at least the first 3 years of life. In contrast, it has been shown that infants 18 months of age or less can retain information over long periods. Although there is no agreed-upon explanation of this paradoxical phenomenon, there are proposed biological, cognitive, and social-cognitive explanations. Distinguishing among these accounts involves investigating both adults' memories for childhood events and the mnemonicabilities of young children. These studies may not only reveal the reason why our earliest years are shrouded from us as adults, but also shed light on the memory processes that allow us a rich representation of the remainder of our personal past.     

Working Memory for Temporal and Nontemporal Events in Monkeys

This is the first report that introduces appropriate behavioral tasks for monkeys for investigations of working memory for temporal and nontemporal events. Using several behavioral tests, the study also shows how temporal information is coded during retention intervals in the tasks. Each of three monkeys was trained with two working memory tasks: delayed matching-to-sample of stimulus duration (DMS-D) and delayed matching-to-sample of stimulus color (DMS-C). The two tasks employed an identical apparatus and responses and differed only in the temporal and nontemporal attribute of the stimuli to be retained for correct performance. When a retention interval between the sample and comparison stimuli was prolonged, the monkeys made more incorrect responses to short samples in the DMS-C task, suggesting “trace decay” of memory for short stimuli. However, the same monkeys showed no such increase in incorrect responses to short samples in the DMS-D task, suggesting active coding of temporal information, that is, the length of stimulus duration, during the retention interval. When variable lengths of samples were presented with a fixed retention interval, the monkeys made more incorrect responses when length differences between short and long samples were small in the DMS-D task, but not in the DMS-C task. This suggests that the codes of working memory retained in the DMS-D task were not absolute (analogical) but rather were relative (categorical) and related to differences in the duration of the samples.     

Multiple Organisations of Events in Memory

Theories of memory organisation propose that activity knowledge organises autobiographical memory globally. According to these views, memories that share a participant, location, or time are only organised together if they also share an activity. If they do not, they are nested within their respective activity organisations locally rather than being organised together globally. Two experiments that assessed people's clustering of laboratory events consistently obtained findings that contradict this view. Both experiments found that people organise event memories globally in non-activity clusters, cross-classify events into multiple organisations, and pivot between activity and non-activity clusters. Consistent with studies of naturalistic events, these studies of laboratory events indicate that people crossclassify event memories simultaneously into multiple global organisations.     

Children as Earwitnesses: Memory for Emotional Auditory Events

We examined the influence of age and emotionality of auditory stimuli on long‐term memory for environmental sound events. Sixty children aged 7–11 years were presented with two environmental sound events: an emotional car crash and a neutral event, someone brushing their teeth. The sound events comprised six individual environmental sounds, and the participants passively listened to the sound events through a headset. After a two‐week delay, participants performed a cued recall task and a recognition task. Independent of age, children were notably poor at recalling the sound events. Children recalled and recognized significantly more sounds from the emotional sound event than the neutral sound event. Additionally, the older children performed the recall task better than the younger children. The present findings confirm and expand the previously reported superiority of emotional material in memory.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adult Eyewitness Memory for Single Versus Repeated Traumatic Events

Reports from individuals who have witnessed multiple, similar emotional events may differ from reports from witnesses of only a single event. To test this, we had participants (N = 65) view a video of a road traffic accident. Half of the participants saw two additional (similar) aversive films. Afterwards, participants filled out the Self‐Administered Interview on the target film twice with an interval of 1 week. Participants who saw multiple similar films were less accurate in recalling details from the target film than participants in the control condition. On their second report, participants were less complete but more accurate compared with their first report. These results indicate that adults who have witnessed multiple repeated events may appear less reliable in their reports than adults who have witnessed a single event. These findings are relevant when evaluating eyewitness evidence and call for new approaches to questioning witnesses about repeated events.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Episodic Indexing: A Model of Memory for Attention Events

People often remember what they attend to in the world. Such memory can be cast as a kind of mental catalog or index of attended objects. To investigate how such an index is acquired and used, protocol data were collected from a programmer who scrolled to off-screen objects from time to time as she worked. These protocol data were modeled using Soar, which constrains how the index is constructed. In the model, an index entry is an episodic trace encoded during attention. The trace associates the attention event with a time symbol denoting the event's occurrence. Later, the model can ask itself whether it saw that object by calling to mind an image of the attention event. If this image retrieves a time symbol, then the model infers that the object exists and can reason about bringing the object back into view. Episodic indexing is a theory of these encoding and retrieval processes. It posits that information about attention events is encoded automatically, but that retrieval requires effort and knowledge. Episodic indexing is congruent with a range of results on episodic and temporal codes and recognition and recall processes. It incorporates source monitoring (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993) and is a simple and pervasive form of long-term working memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995).     

Memory for Intratrial Events in Learning Disjunctive Concepts: Implications for Hypothesis-Testing Models

The present experiment was designed to further investigate the adequacy of hypothesis-testing models to account for how concepts are acquired. Disjunctive concept formation tasks were administered to 75 college students to examine predictions of hypothesis-testing theory concerning memory for intratrial events. The different events explored were hypotheses, responses, feedback, and stimuli. A 4 × 4 × 3 within-subjects design was employed in which question type, number of intratrial events recalled, and percentage of trials with memory probe were the factors. A major finding was the failure of students to recall the hypothesis stated on previous trials, under certain conditions, which contradicts predictions based on hypothesis-testing theories. Implications for opposing frequency theory are discussed.     

Memory for Unconsciously Perceived Events: Evidence from Anesthetized Patients

Studies investigating memory for events during anesthesia show a confusing pattern of positive and negative results. To establish whether there are any consistent patterns of findings across studies, we conducted a meta-analysis of the data from 2517 patients in 44 studies. The meta-analysis included two measures of the effects of positive suggestions on postoperative recovery: (a) the duration of postoperative hospitalization and (b) the amount of morphine administered via patient-controlled anesthesia, as well as two measures of memory for specific information presented during anesthesia: (c) direct tests and (d) indirect tests. The meta-analysis indicated that positive suggestions presented during anesthesia have little or no effect on postoperative recovery. On the other hand, the meta-analysis showed that specific information is remembered following surgery, as long as testing is not delayed longer than 36 h. Studies of memory for events during anesthesia provide a useful avenue for exploring unconscious cognition.     

The Role of Typical and Atypical Events in Story Memory

To understand how viewers or readers process and remember media narratives such as entertainment, news, and information is critical to our understanding of the mental processing of television and other media. Media stories contain both typical and atypical events and people, but little is known about how readers or viewers process and remember these two types of information. Participants in 2 experiments remembered atypical story items much better even a week later. However, the conservative way they treated atypical memories could give the illusion that typical items are better remembered than they really are. The results have implications for both mass media theory and theories of memory.     

Events That Increase Uncertainty in Personal Relationships II Replication and Extension

Events that change relational knowledge were investigated because they have theoretical implications for uncertainty reduction and relational cognition and they have important consequences in terms of personal trauma and relational damage. Data were gathered in ways that corrected major problems in earlier studies, results were compared between two studies, and hypotheses about differences were tested. Additional information was also gathered concerning how often such events occurred, what led up to them, attributions about causes, coping strategies, and how the experience was viewed in hindsight. The results indicated that although the emotional and cognitive effects of the events were nearly as strong as found in earlier studies, the effects on relationships were not as negative. Other findings and their implications for uncertainty reduction theory and existing models of schema change were also discussed.     

Generation Identity and the Reminiscence Bump: Memory for Public and Private Events

Participants ranging in age from 30 to 70 years free-recalled when they had learned public and private items of news. When responses were plotted in terms of age of participant at time of encoding, it was found that peak recall for public items of news was in the period when participants were aged 10 to 19 years whereas peak recall of private items of news occurred in the period when participants were aged 20 to 29 years. A second study confirmed this pattern of an early reminiscence bump for public news. It is proposed that these two components of the reminiscence bump reflect, respectively, a period of formation of generation identity in the second decade of life and a period of formation of intimate relationships in the third decade.     

宽恕与个体特征、环境事件的关系

国外大量的研究探讨了宽恕与社会认知、共情、人格、人际关系、心理健康以及文化、侵犯事件等因素的关系,而且注重考察这些研究结果的应用价值和有效的临床干预模式。对国内外关于宽恕与个体特征、环境事件等因素关系的研究进行简单的回顾和介绍,开发适合中国人特点的测量工具,深入系统地探讨宽恕对个体及社会的短期效应和长期效应在未来研究中将得到更多的关注。