Autobiographical Memory & Recollective Experience.

1. Autobiographical Memory & Recollective Experience. Martin A. Conway Department of Psychology, University of Durham, England. e-mail: M.A.Conway@durham.ac.uk

2. What are ‘Autobiographical Memories’?

3. Autobiographical memories are dynamic transitory mental constructions generated from an underlying multilevel knowledge base which is itself under control of executive processes.

4. The Self-Memory System

5. In our model memories are generated within a complex mental system called the “self-memory-system” or SMS. The SMS has two major components: • A knowledge base (in long-term memory). • A set of control processes - which we call the “Working Self”.

6. The Knowledge Base.

7. Autobiographical Knowledge: Conceptual or abstract knowledge about one’s life (sometimes referred to as personal semantic knowledge). • Episodic Memories: Representations of event specific details.

8. Autobiographical Memories: Are the transitory joining of conceptual autobiographical knowledge with episodic memories.

9. Autobiographical Memory Knowledge Structures in Long-Term Memory

11. Episodic Memory

12. Eight Characteristics • Retain summary records of sensory-perceptual-conceptual-affective processing derived from working memory. • Represent short time slices, determined by changes in goal-processing. • Retain patterns of activation/inhibition over long periods. • Represented roughly in order of occurrence. • They are only retained in a durable form if they become linked to conceptual autobiographical knowledge. • They are recollectively experienced when accessed. • When included as part of an AM construction they provide specificity. • Neuroanatomically they may be represented in brain regions separate from other AM knowledge networks.

13. The Working Self

14. A complex hierarchy of goals which are all active but which, at any give time, vary in their degree of activation. • A set of self images* and plans derived from the goal hierarchy. *Self images = stories, narratives, actual images, constellations of affect, or all or some combination of these. They are not necessarily conscious but conscious representations might be derived from them.

15. The Memory Construction Process Generative and Direct Retrieval

17. Thinking Aloud While Recalling Memories Autobiographical Memory Protocols

18. Two Protocols

19. Two Examples of Memories Recalled In the Lab.

20. Example I: A memory freely recalled by a 54-year old recalling memories from any point in his life. I remember a bright sunny morning walking down a hill near our house. I had on a red jacket, red shirt, blue jeans, and brown suede boots. I was seventeen. I was going into town and I felt great...it was a feeling of being sort of utterly calm, utterly well, a feeling of expectancy: interesting things were about to happen. It was a feeling I don’t think I have had in such a pure form since.

21. Example II: A response made by a person asked to recall a memory to the (cue) word “Ship”. We were going on holiday to France. I remember that we stayed at a boarding house in Dover and went down to the ferry very early the following morning. My brother and I were wildly excited it was the first time we had been abroad and the first time we had been on a ship of any sorts. I have a vivid memory of looking back at the White Cliffs as the boat pulled out of the harbour - they seemed immensely tall, (Conway, 1996).

22. The Brain and Memory

23. A Neuroimaging Study of Memory Retrieval using EEG.

24. Participants recalled memories to cue words while we monitored changes in brain activation: • Prior to retrieval. • During retrieval. • While a memory was held in mind.

25. Pre-Retrieval, Retrieval, & Hold Left Right Anterior Posterior

26. Recollective Experience

27. Recollective Experience • Recollective experience is the feeling of remembering (a cognitive feeling).

28. In autobiographical remembering it occurs when episodic memories are accessed. • Indeed, EMs when accessed always give rise to recollective experience (Wheeler, et al., 1997, Conway, 2001). • It is associated with images (usually visual), feelings, and a strong sense of the self in the past.

29. Moreover when episodic memories enter conscious awareness they ‘hijack’ attention and the system enters what Tulving (1983) called ‘retrieval’ mode.

30. However, recollective experience although very strongly associated with the conscious representation of EMs can occur: independently of the conscious experience of an EM.

31. EMs may be accessed but kept out of consciousness (perhaps because of their effect on attention, their cognitive ‘cost’) by control systems, i.e. the working self. But even if they do not enter consciousness they may still trigger recollective experience.

32. Characteristics of EM: Memory Awareness. Recollective experience does not only occur for EMs but can also occur for false memories (Conway, et al., 1996; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) and perhaps in other ways too.

33. Characteristics of EM: Memory Awareness. • For instance, the preseizure “dream” state experienced by some temporal lobe epileptics often features intense feelings of déjà vu. • Déjà vu as recollective experience for the present.

34. Characteristics of EM: Memory Awareness. • The temporal lobe epileptics studied by Bancaud, et al., (1994), mainly with right temporal lobe pathology, had the dream state electrophysiologically induced. • A typical comment from a patient in the dream state was: “The impression of having already done what I am in the process of doing; it seems to me that I have already lived through the entire situation; with a feeling of strangeness and often of fear” NB. The feeling is one of ‘deja vecu’ rather then deja vu.

35. An experience of déjà vu from Dickens • "At sunset, when I was walking alone, while the horses rested, I arrived upon a little scene, which, by one of those singular mental operations of which we are all conscious, seemed perfectly familiar to me, and which I see distinctly now. There was not much in it. In the blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just stirred by the evening wind; upon its margin a few trees. In the foreground (of a view of Ferrara) was a group of silent peasant girls leaning over the parapet of a little bridge, looking now up at the sky, now down into the water. In the distance a deep dell; the shadow of approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered there in some former life I could not have seemed to remember the place more thoroughly or with more emphatic chilling of the blood; and the real remembrance of it acquired in that minute is so strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly think I could forget it. " (Dickens, Pictures from Italy).

36. Characteristics of EM: The Recollective Experience Circuit. • Bancaud, et al., monitored electrophysiological activation during the dream state in the temporal lobes and limbic system. • They concluded that the dream state was mediated by a circuit located in the medial and lateral regions of the temporal lobes. • Networks in the hippocampus, amygdala, and superior temporal gyrus, have privileged access to this circuit.

37. Patients AKP & MA: Chronic Déjà Vu with Recollective Confabulation. • AKP (Moulin, Conway, & James, in prep.) • 79 year-old, former engineer, university education, bilingual. • Following bilateral atrophy of the temporal lobes and hippocampus (greater on the left than the right), he was referred to a memory clinic (primarily for DAT). • According to his doctor “He does seem to have considerable problems with a sense of déjà vu, both when reading his scientific journals and when reading the newspapers…..”

38. Patient AKP: Chronic Déjà Vu • Intellectually unimpaired, MMSE of 26/28/27, normal fluency, no progressive brain disease, and not diagnosed as DAT. • Quite severe memory problems with impaired free recall, cued recall, and poor recognition with marked overextension of ‘remember’ judgements to false positives. • In his everyday life he constantly experiences déjà vu.

39. MA is a 70 year old woman of average intelligence. • Diagnosed as DAT. • She presented to her GP with her husband, who reported that it was as though his wife could predict the future. She was often convinced that things had happened before and complained of persistent feelings of deja vu.

40. AKP MA NeuropsychologicalExamination Raw scores Age 80 70 Mini-mental state examination 25 20 NART IQ 115 103 Story Recall Immediate 7 12 Story Recall Delayed 0 0 Visual Recognition – Discrimination Index 9 2 Hopkins Verbal Learning - HVLT Recall 14 14 HVLT Recognition – Hits (FPs) 12 (8) 12 (5) Trails A (sec) 60 182 Trails B (sec) 186 420 FAS (adjusted for education) 30 25 Patients AKP and MA

41. Memory Tests MA AKP

45. Summary AKP and MA have: False recognition Appropriate confidence judgements Poor recall (but not as bad as recog.) Recollective experience for the present They suffer from “Recollective Confabulation” Moreover they also act upon the (inappropriate) feeling of remembering

46. Patient AKP: Chronic Déjà Vu • AKP for instance, rarely reads the newspaper believing himself to have already read it. For the same reason he no longer watches television, reads books and letters (the same is true for MA).

47. Déjà vecu Christmas cards TV programmes and newspapers Tape player Radio Interview News Events Autobiographical information – Classic reduplicative paramnesia or ‘deja vecu’.

48. Patient AKP: Chronic Déjà Vu • If challenged about how he could have read or seen some item before he usually has a plausible story (confabulation), one not open to contradiction. (When asked, “So what happens next?” He replied, “How should I know I’ve got a memory problem”). • In short AKP’s chronically overextended feeling of remembering leads him to generate confabulations that ‘explain’ his déjà vu. • This, in turn, leads him to believe that he has already attained goals when he has not, and subsequently to act on these erroneous beliefs.

49. Groundhog day Appointments with bank and priest Moss on roof Lost items

50. We believe that AKP’s and MA’s déjà vecu is a product of fairly constant activation of the recollective experience circuit. • Our view is that this is normal and occurs all the time as EMs are activated automatically by external and internal cues.