BHS 499-07 Memory and Amnesia

1. BHS 499-07Memory and Amnesia Autobiographical Memory

2. Autobiographical Memory • When we meet people we introduce ourselves by exchanging memories. • Excerpts from our “life story” • Autobiographical memory covers events, situations and other knowledge that spans a person’s entire life. • Autobiographical memory is a narrative.

3. Episodic or Semantic? • Autobiographical memories are much more than just episodic memory. • More constructive and integrative. • Spanning multiple events. • Includes semantic-like generic info: where you work, phone numbers, etc. • Semantic memories are affected by autobiographical memory. • We know more about personal heroes.

4. Levels of Autobiographical Memory • Event level – detailed, referring to specific, individual events. • General level – referring to extended sequences or repeated series of events sharing a common component. • Lifetime period – broad, theme-based portions of a person’s life. • Relationship theme, work theme.

5. Event-Specific Memories • These most closely correspond to episodic memories. • Involve a common activity at a particular place • Lots of perceptual and contextual detail. • Includes internal context material about emotional reaction and physiological state. • May be lost or may endure over time.

6. Four Characteristics of Enduring Event-Specific Memories • Memories of originating events – a childhood experience that sets someone on a goal-related path to a career. • Turning points where a life is suddenly redirected. • Anchoring events for a belief system. • Analogous events used to guide future behavior – e.g., embarrassing moments.

7. General Event Memories • Two types: • A sequence of event-specific memories that form a larger episode (such as the first day of a new job). • A repeating event (such as a class taken). • There is often a personal goal that is affected by the extended event. • Integrative and interpretive thinking used to link events into a single memory trace.

8. Lifetime Period Memories • Long periods organized along some common theme. • Early childhood, career, education. • Recall of autobiographical memories beyond a general event is organized along a theme.

9. Evidence for the Hierarchy • This is a heuristic because there are many examples of memories that don’t fit – it is unclear where they belong. • Smaller parts can be nested into larger ones. • People have different aspects of their lives going on concurrently – overlap.

10. Neurological Evidence • Amnesics can recall general event and lifetime periods but not specific events. • S.S. (herpes encephalitis) – can remember his job • K.C. (motorcycle accident) – general semantic knowledge but not specifics, e.g., floorplan of house he grew up in, but not his own room. • K.S. (rt. anterior lobectomy for epilepsy) – recalled specifics but not general info.

11. Memory as Life Narrative • We organize the events of our lives into a narrative structure, not semantic. • Our life is told as a story • We access info using basic event components: people, places, activities, other themes. • Anything stored with the event can be a cue, e.g., odors.

12. Recall of Narrative Memory • When people remember, they recall clusters of memories around a theme. • People remember items related causally to one another. • People remember items that share the same person, place or activity – not time. • Semantic memory is used to make the memories more narrative in style. • Better at recalling forward, than backward.

13. Perspectives • Field memories – experienced from the original perspective, as lived. • More emotional, common in PTSD • Observer memories – experienced from outside ourselves, perhaps even watching ourselves, detached. • We could not do this if memory were not constructed. • More likely to be older memories, self-aware.

14. Schema-Copy-Plus-Tag Model • The older memories become the more schema-consistent because schemas are used to fill in missing info. • We better remember the parts that are unusual, so memory doesn’t feel stereotyped. • Model says people remember schemas plus tags with the deviations, making the memory unique.

15. Item-Specific vs Relational Processing • This distinction between schemas and tags is like the semantic distinction between item-specific and relational processing. • Difficult to tell which schema-consistent events really happened and which didn’t. • It is easy to tell how the event was different than the schema (tag contains that info), even though it may not be the most important info.

16. Infantile Amnesia • Our earliest memories come from around age 2-4. • Many reported memories from earlier ages actually come from seeing pictures or hearing family stories. • A lot of learning occurs during the first two years, but nearly all events are lost.

17. Explanations • Psychodynamic view – repressed by the developing superego because they involve fantasies about sex with parent. • Neurological view – the hippocampus is undeveloped at birth and only reaches adult form after a few years. • Schema organization view – infants do not yet have organized schemas.

18. More Explanations • Language development view – language is needed to form a coherent narrative. • Preverbal children do not translate knowledge into verbal info until they learn how to talk. • Emergent self view – infants lack a sense of themselves as separate from environment, no “I” as causal agent. • Autobio memories construct around sense of self.

19. Multicomponent Development Theory • There are a number of memory abilities or components that emerge to bring about autobiographical memory. • Adequate episodic memory system • Knowledge of how adults think and talk about the world and the passage of time. • How a person understands himself or herself. • Different cultures have different offset ages for infantile amnesia.

20. Reminiscence Bump • Memories of a person’s life are dominated by those from around age 20. • Free-listing of autobiographical memories shows: • Recency effect, standard forgetting curve into the past. • Bump between 15 and 25.

21. Explanations • Cognitive view – occurs because the memories around 20 are the first ones of their type, a primacy effect. • Life scripts may guide recall with positive life transitions around the bump times. • Neurological view – people reach their peak at the bump time, declines after. • Identity formation view – people decide who they are at that time in life with better connectivity.

22. Flashbulb Memories • Vivid memories with great detail, relatively resistent to forgetting: • Challenger explosion, Princess Di’s death, 9/11 • Include memory for the context, not just event • “Now Print!” mechanism in neural coding – original explanation but no support. • Normal memories, not special.

23. Accuracy of Flashbulb Memories • Because they are like normal memories, inaccuracies can creep in over time, they can be forgotten. • Because they are emotionally charged, people believe they are more accurate. • The stronger the emotional reaction, the more the memory is believed. • Pearl Harbor example – no baseball in Dec.

24. How are they Formed? • What we remember better is our reaction to the event, not the event itself. • Distinguishing qualities: • The event must be novel (surprising) – less likely to be affected by interference. • The event must have serious consequences for the person experiencing it. • An intensive emotional reaction must occur.

25. What Strengthens Them? • Emotionally intense events raise arousal which aids memorization. • More attention, more elaborative processing and more reminders lead to better recall. • Events are rehashed repeatedly, so more practice. • Knowledge is needed for elaboration.