The self in autobiographical memory: effects of self-salience on narrative content and structure

Contemporary models of autobiographical memory attribute a prominent role to the conceptualisation of the self. In an attempt to better understand the impact of the self as an organising feature of autobiographical memory, narratives of personal episodes were elicited, either after a questionnaire about the self (self-prime condition) or after a distractor task (control condition). Participants also wrote a narrative of a turning-point memory, which is by definition a self-focused narrative. Narratives were divided into propositions and analysed for the types of statements used. As predicted, when writing self-focused turning-point narratives participants included more statements relating to the meaning of an event and connecting it to the self, and fewer statements focusing on the who, what, where, and when of the narrative. Narratives written after the self-prime also demonstrated characteristics that were similar to turning-point narratives, although not on all measures. This shift in narrative focus in turning-point and self-primed memory narratives indicates an increased attempt to fulfil goals of coherence rather than correspondence (Conway, 2005). These findings lend insight into the nature of the relationship between the semantic conceptualisation of the self, and the process of retrieving event-specific knowledge in episodic memory.     

The self in autobiographical memory: Effects of self-salience on narrative content and structure

Contemporary models of autobiographical memory attribute a prominent role to the conceptualisation of the self. In an attempt to better understand the impact of the self as an organising feature of autobiographical memory, narratives of personal episodes were elicited, either after a questionnaire about the self (self-prime condition) or after a distractor task (control condition). Participants also wrote a narrative of a turning-point memory, which is by definition a self-focused narrative. Narratives were divided into propositions and analysed for the types of statements used. As predicted, when writing self-focused turning-point narratives participants included more statements relating to the meaning of an event and connecting it to the self, and fewer statements focusing on the who, what, where, and when of the narrative. Narratives written after the self-prime also demonstrated characteristics that were similar to turning-point narratives, although not on all measures. This shift in narrative focus in turning-point and self-primed memory narratives indicates an increased attempt to fulfil goals of coherence rather than correspondence (Conway, 2005). These findings lend insight into the nature of the relationship between the semantic conceptualisation of the self, and the process of retrieving event-specific knowledge in episodic memory.     

Theology and narrative: the self,the novel,the Bible

This paper critically evaluates the work of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre by comparing their understanding of the narrative structure of selfhood with paradigms derived from three other sources: Heidegger’s conception of human being as Dasein; Rowan Williams’ interpretation of Dostoevsky’s theology of narrative; and Kierkegaard’s project of reading the Old Testament narrative of Abraham and Isaac as part of the Christian God’s autobiography. These comparisons suggest that Taylor and MacIntyre’s own narratives of Western culture lack a certain, theologically required openness to a variety of specific ways in which both individuality and history resist understanding in narrative terms as much as they demand it.     

Culture, memory, and the self: An analysis of the personal and collective self in long-term memory

We used a memory paradigm to test whether the nature of representations of the self within long-term memory differed as a function of cultural background. In Western samples words encoded in relation to the self are typically remembered better, and Euro-Canadian participants here showed this standard self-reference effect. However, Asian-Canadian participants were slower to recognize personal traits (as opposed to collective traits) when these traits had been encoded in reference to the self, suggesting a more elaborate representation of the collective self than the personal self in long-term memory. Further, memory was actually inhibited for Asian-Canadians when personal traits were encoded in reference to the self (vs. encoded with other referents). Differences in long-term memory trace strength for self-related data may emerge even as differences in the working self do not, and implications of this difference are discussed.     

Family narrative interaction and children's sense of self

Family narratives about the shared past may be a particularly significant site for preadolescents' emerging sense of self both as an individual and as a member of a unified family. We examined the relations between family narrative interaction style when reminiscing and preadolescents' sense of self. Results indicated three narrative interaction styles that describe the extent to which families discuss or fail to discuss their past in integrated and validating ways. Specifically, conversations with a coordinated perspective incorporated information from all members and were related to higher self-esteem, especially in girls. Conversations with an individual perspective, in which family members took turns telling their thoughts and feelings about the event without integration among the perspectives, were associated with a more external locus of control, especially in boys. Conversations with an imposed perspective, in which one family member was in charge of the conversation or in which unpleasant exchanges between members occurred, were not associated with either self-esteem or locus of control. Implications of these narrative interaction styles for children's developing sense of self are discussed.     

The psychology of memory,extended cognition,and socially distributed remembering

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory.     

Affectivity and the distinction between minimal and narrative self

Continental Philosophy Review - In the contemporary phenomenological literature it has been argued that it is possible to distinguish between two forms of selfhood: the “minimal” and...     

The evocative power of enactments.

The inevitability of analytic enactments, defined as symbolic interactions between patient and analyst, is discussed. Clinical material from the psychoanalysis of a latency-age child is presented to illustrate the role of enactments and to demonstrate their usefulness in furthering the analytic work.     

奖赏与自我加工对记忆的影响

【摘 要】目的:从外显和内隐层面探讨奖赏与自我加工对记忆的影响。方法：以大学生为被试,以人格形容词为实验材料,采用R/K范式,测量被试对识记词语的记忆效果。结果：（1）外显记忆层面,奖赏与自我加工均促进了记忆效果;（2）在内隐记忆层面,自我存在记忆的加工优势,但是没有发现奖赏加工对记忆的影响。结论：自我相关刺激促进了内隐和外显记忆的加工,奖赏刺激只对外显记忆有影响,实验结果支持独立平行模型,即在不同记忆层面,奖赏加工与自我参照加工存在不同加工机制。     

On being educated in the west: The disruption in self as a narrative and authenticity and inauthenticity of self

In this article I have argued that the issue of the effect of education on one getting educated is an ontological one. I make my case with the help of Heidegger's concepts of Dasein, and man's-being-in-the-world. I first argue that tradition is constitutive of one's being, and that man's being is in-a-tradition, and then make the case that education is located in tradition, and that education is a process by which one is initiated into that tradition. As a consequence getting educated in a tradition outside one's own has the effect of dislocating the being of the one getting educated.     

On being educated in the west: The disruption in self as a narrative and authenticity and inauthenticity of self

In this article I have argued that the issue of the effect of education on one getting educated is an ontological one. I make my case with the help of Heidegger's concepts of Dasein, and man's-being-in-the-world. I first argue that tradition is constitutive of one's being, and that man's being is in-a-tradition, and then make the case that education is located in tradition, and that education is a process by which one is initiated into that tradition. As a consequence getting educated in a tradition outside one's own has the effect of dislocating the being of the one getting educated.     

Reading from the middle: Heidegger and the narrative self

Heidegger's Being and Time is an underappreciated venue for pursuing work on the role narrative plays in self‐understanding and self‐constitution, and existing work misses Heidegger's most interesting contribution. Implicit in his account of Dasein (an individual human person) is a notion of the narrative self more compelling than those now on offer. Bringing together an adaptive interpretation of Heidegger's notion of “thrown projection”, Wolfgang Iser's account of “the wandering viewpoint”, and more recent Anglo‐American work on the narrative self, I argue that we read our ongoing existences in the same way that, mid‐story, we read a narrative. Reading is a better master metaphor than authorship, narration, plot, or character to guide investigations of narrative's relation to the self. It is not merely a metaphor, however, as the hermeneutic structures involved in interpreting existence and a narrative from the middle are the same.     

The fidelity of visual memory for faces and non-face objects

The fidelity of visual working memory was assessed for faces and non-face objects. In two experiments, four levels of memory load (1, 2, 3, or 4 items) were combined with four perceptual distances between probe and study items, with maximum item confusability occurring for the minimum memory load. Under these conditions, recognition memory for multiple faces exceeded that of a single face. This result was primarily due to the higher false alarm rates for faces than non-face objects, even though the two classes of stimuli had been matched for perceptual discriminability. Control experiments revealed that this counterintuitive result emerged only for old–new recognition choices based on near-threshold image differences. For non-face objects, instead, recognition performance decreased with increasing memory load. It is speculated that the low memorial discriminability of the transient properties of a face may serve the purpose of enhancing recognition at the individual-exemplar level.     

Psychological ownership: The implicit association between self and already-owned versus newly-owned objects

Evidence from explicit measures (e.g. favourability ratings, valuations) has led to the prevalent hypothesis that owned objects become cognitively associated with self-concept. Using a novel version of the Implicit Association Test (self-object IAT), wherein participants categorized objects by colour, we evaluated implicit cognitive associations involving self with already-owned and newly-owned objects. We observed faster responses when self-related words required the same response key as the colour that incidentally corresponded to self-owned objects, irrespective of length of ownership. These findings suggest that participants efficiently form cognitive associations between self and self-owned objects within mere minutes of ownership induction and inspire questions about the extent to which length of ownership drives the strength of this association.     

自传体叙事中的自我欺骗:个体的自我认同策略

自传体叙事中的自我欺骗是一种从个体内角度理解的自我欺骗,是无人际压力情况下个体自我建构过程中所使用的一种认同策略。这种自我欺骗发生在自传体叙事过程中,个体通过叙事语言拉开"新我"和"旧我"的叙事距离,建立新的目标追求并实现,最终构建新的叙事认同。在这个过程中,个体在维持正性自我概念的动机驱动下,采用有偏差的信息加工方式叙述自我故事,满足情绪体验与情绪评价一致性的需要,进而影响个体的自我意识,引发自我改变。未来研究可以探讨自传体叙事中自我欺骗在临床中的行为表现与治疗策略,考察其认知神经机制,并探讨不同社会文化背景下自我欺骗的特点与影响因素。     

Children's emotions and memory for affective narrative content

The present study was an investigation of effects of emotional states on children's learning and memory for a short narrative. Happy, sad, or neutral moods were induced in 72 second-grade boys and girls by a standard affect induction procedure. This mood induction was accomplished either before or after they heard a story in which two protagonists encountered a variety of experiences having an affective character. For half of the subjects, the initial story event had a positive affective valence, and for half it was negative. Children's memory for events in the narrative was assessed immediately afterward, using measures offo free recall, cued recall, and recognition. Children recalled more affective content than neutral content, and boys recalled more than girls. Valence of the initial story item and sex of subject influenced the relationship between mood state and memory for story events. Under some conditions, positive moods reduced recognition accuracy for positive material. The findings suggest that simple patterns of mood-influenced memory found in previous studies are modified by factors such as characteristics of the learner and the organization of the material to be learned. The relationship between mood and memory thus appears to be more complex than previously recognized.This experiment was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BNS-8308147) to John C. Masters. The authors wish to thank Bill Harris, Suzanne Chabaud, and Saneya Hassan for assistance in data collection and coding.     

Integrated memory for objects, places, and temporal order: evidence for episodic-like memory in mice

Human episodic memory refers to the recollection of an unique past experience in terms of what happened, and where and when it happened. Factoring out the issue of conscious recollection, episodic memory, even at the behavioral level, has been difficult to demonstrate in non-human mammals. Although, it was previously shown that rodents can associate what and when or what and where information given on unique trials, it proved to be difficult to demonstrate memory for what, where, and when simultaneously in mammals, without using extensive training procedures, which might induce semantic rather than episodic memory recall. Towards the goal of an animal model of human episodic memory we designed an three-trial object exploration task in which different versions of the novelty-preference paradigm were combined to subsume (a) object recognition memory, (b) the memory for locations in which objects were explored, and (c) the temporal order memory for object presented at distinct time points. We found that mice spent more time exploring two "old familiar" objects relative to two "recent familiar" objects, reflecting memory for what and when and concomitantly directed more exploration at a spatially displaced "old familiar" object relative to a stationary "old familiar" object, reflecting memory for what and where. These results suggest that during a single test trial the mice were able to (a) recognize previously explored objects, (b) remember the location in which particular objects were previously encountered, and (c) to discriminate the relative recency in which different objects were presented. According to the currently discussed behavioral criteria for episodic-like memory in animals, our results suggest that mice are capable to form such higher order memories.     

Aging impacts memory for perceptual,but not narrative,event details

Memory is well known to decline over the course of healthy aging. However, memory is not a monolith and draws from different kinds of representations. Historically, much of our understanding of age-related memory decline stems from recognition of isolated studied items. In contrast, real-life events are often remembered as narratives, and this kind of information is generally missed in typical recognition memory studies. Here, we designed a task to tax mnemonic discrimination of event details, directly contrasting perceptual and narrative memory. Older and younger adults watched an episode of a television show and later completed an old/new recognition test featuring targets, novel foils, and similar lures in narrative and perceptual domains. While we observed no age-related differences on basic recognition of repeated targets and novel foils, older adults showed a deficit in correctly rejecting perceptual, but not narrative, lures. These findings provide insight into the vulnerability of different memory domains in aging and may be useful in characterizing individuals at risk for pathological cognitive decline.

Memory decline is among the most commonly reported cognitive changes with aging (Craik 1994; Bäckman et al. 2001; Salthouse 2003). In particular, older adults appear to show marked decline in the ability to support episodic memories for specific events and instances (Nilsson 2003; Salthouse 2003; Hedden and Gabrieli 2004). Older adults reliably show deficits when freely recalling studied information (Craik and McDowd 1987; Gutchess et al. 2006) or remembering specific item–context pairings (Old and Naveh-Benjamin 2008; Craik et al. 2010). In contrast, older adults do not consistently show deficiencies in old/new recognition memory. This and related evidence have led to the view that older adults have preserved memory for gist, but loss of specific details (Schacter et al. 1997; Abadie et al. 2021; Grilli and Sheldon 2022). That is, older adults tend to remember a general understanding of the overall experience but are disadvantaged at maintaining precise, high-fidelity details (Radvansky et al. 2001). However, it is not well understood whether such relative loss of detailed memory extends across information domains.The Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) is a recognition paradigm that is specifically designed to tax high-fidelity memory representations (Kirwan and Stark 2007; Stark et al. 2013, 2019). MST performance depends on maintaining similar representations in memory as distinct and nonoverlapping (Yassa and Stark 2011). This is thought to rely on pattern separation in the hippocampus (McClelland et al. 1995; Norman and O''Reilly 2003; Leutgeb et al. 2007; Bakker et al. 2008), a process that is strongly impacted in the aging brain (Wilson et al. 2006; Burke et al. 2010). Typical MST paradigms involve an incidental encoding task, such as making indoor or outdoor judgments for pictures of everyday objects, and then a surprise recognition memory test. In the memory test, participants are tasked to identify exact repetitions of previously encoded objects (targets), new objects (foils), and objects that are perceptually similar to images encountered during the encoding task (lures) as old or new. Older adults are more likely to endorse similar lures as previously studied items (Toner et al. 2009; Holden et al. 2013), which correlates with aberrant structural and functional properties of the human hippocampus and surrounding cortical regions (Yassa et al. 2011a; Reagh et al. 2018). The MST therefore offers mechanistic insights into high-fidelity recognition-based memory in the human brain.Nonetheless, studies using the MST have often limited their scope to detecting visual changes among isolated items. Other recognition studies that have incorporated discrimination of highly similar information in more complex formats, such as source memory discrimination, also report age-related deficits (Schacter et al. 1991; Chalfonte and Johnson 1996; Naveh-Benjamin et al. 2003; Dennis et al. 2008). For instance, older adults had difficulty assessing the source of a word when it originated from two female speakers compared with across gender speakers (Ferguson et al. 1992). These studies, however, largely assess recognition memory processes for isolated items—snapshots of perceptual experience in the context of a laboratory experiment. Moreover, there is growing evidence that aging does not equally impact all domains of information that are involved in constructing a memory. For instance, recent work suggests that aging distinctly influences medial temporal lobe circuits underlying memory for items versus contexts or space (Reagh et al. 2016, 2018; Berron et al. 2018).Real-world memories are not made of isolated pieces of information, but instead are structured and bridged together by meaning (Schank 1975; Conway and Rubin 2019; Cohn-Sheehy et al. 2022). Prior studies have shown that older adults are relatively impaired at detecting and remembering perceptual changes in everyday events, suggesting that basic findings from MST paradigms likely translate to real-world deficits (Wahlheim and Zacks 2019). However, a critical component of human memory is information about narratives, whether autobiographical or fictional (Radvansky et al. 2005; León 2016). Narratives tend to be organized to follow an ideal internal structure that can be relied on (Mandler and Johnson 1977; Thorndyke 1977). Studies that use narratives to test memory typically task participants with recalling information from a story or event. This has led to the idea that aging impacts recall more drastically than recognition (Danckert and Craik 2013). Interestingly, similar to studies of recognition memory, recall performance in aging has been characterized by loss of specific details and emphasis on information that capture the central idea of an experience (Addis et al. 2008). This may be due to the unconstrained nature of recall tasks or because self-initiated recall may be more taxing for older adults. Thus, the extent to which narrative details are truly lost versus not voluntarily retrieved in aging remains unclear. In line with this idea, tasks designed to drive participants to recall events in terms of specific details have shown enhancement effects in older adults (Madore et al. 2014). To our knowledge, however, there has not been an investigation into whether recognition of highly specific narrative details is affected in aging similarly to perceptual details.Testing of narrative and perceptual domains alongside one another in a controlled and highly similar way allows us to gain a better understanding into the processing of different types of information in memory. Memory is not a unitary phenomenon, and memory performance can often be based on multiple processes and types of representations. This approach offers unique insights into the aging brain, as it has been previously proposed that information about narratives and situations may be preferentially encoded differently in distinct cortical pathways to the hippocampus compared with more perceptually focused information (Ranganath and Ritchey 2012; Reagh and Ranganath 2018). Other emerging neural evidence suggests that specific networks specialize in cognitive processes that are relevant for gist and detailed memory (Robin and Moscovitch 2017; Sekeres et al. 2018). Given that these brain networks may be distinctly vulnerable to age-related pathologies (Jagust 2018; Maass et al. 2019), these insights may further offer us clues into pathological aging.Here, we designed a task to simultaneously tax mnemonic discrimination in perceptual and narrative domains. This task is analogous to traditional MST paradigms composed of an incidental encoding task followed by a recognition test. However, with the goal of tapping into mechanisms involved in encoding of the meaningful, continuous, and dynamic world that we live in, the incidental encoding task consists of watching a television sitcom (HBO''s Curb Your Enthusiasm, S01E07: “AAMCO”) (see Fig. 1A). Television shows offer a unique methodology that balances realistic scenarios while directing our attention to specific perceptual and narrative details. After encoding, participants completed an old/new recognition test featuring targets, foils, and similar lures in the perceptual domain, as well as a novel variant testing mnemonic discrimination of narrative details. This allowed us to test detailed memory for perceptual and narrative information using an ecologically valid yet constrained approach. That is, encoding involves an immersive stimulus that hinges on meaningful and nonarbitrary narrative organization. Additionally, although retrieval is akin to a standard recognition test, it assesses memory along two dimensions that may provide insight into how we process different memory representations for lifelike events. Unlike prior studies testing narrative understanding, here we critically tested narrative memory in terms of basic recognition (targets and foils) as well as high-fidelity narrative details (lures). Performance was compared across younger and older adults for both information domains.Open in a separate windowFigure 1.(A) Participants viewed a 26-min episode of a sitcom. (B) Old/new recognition task based on narrative or perceptual details, with order of test domain counterbalanced across participants. Each recognition task consisted of 30 targets (described or depicted moments from the video encoded), similar lures (moments described or depicted as being similar to the video encoded), and novel foils (described or depicted moments not from the video encoded).We predicted no differences in basic recognition of repeated targets and novel foils across age groups based on prior MST results (Stark et al. 2013, 2019; Toner et al. 2009; Holden et al. 2013). In line with prior work showing decreased performance in perceptual lures among older adults (Toner et al. 2009; Holden et al. 2013; Stark et al. 2013, 2019), we further predicted greater age-related deficits in perceptual lure discrimination than narrative lure discrimination. Relatively intact memory for narrative details may reflect being able to rely on narrative structure or the meaning of events.