Lecture 6 - Autobiographical Memory Flashcards
What are autobiographical memories?
- Memories that you hold about yourself and your relationship with the world
- Our selfhood & identity depends on our memories
- Important events that occurred in our lives
- Depends on both episodic & semantic memories
What are the 4 functions of AM?
- Directive functions
- Social functions
- Self-representational
- Helping to cope with adversity
What are the 4 functions of AM?
- Directive functions
- Social functions
- Self-representational
- Helping to cope with adversity
What are the directive functions of AM?
Your knowledge of how you did something in the past can help your problem solving in the future
What are the social functions of AM?
You may reminisce with friends about events which helps develop our relationships
What are the self-representational functions of AM?
Important for your image of yourself (heavily reliant on your memories of yourself and what you perceive yourself to be)
How does AM help to cope with adversity?
Being able to remember positive things to help you get through negative times (or potentially through motivated forgetting)
What did Bluck et al. (2005) find the overlapping the purposes of AM to be?
Directive, self-related, nurturing existing relationships, developing new social relatinships
Describe the classic diary method of study
P’s asked to record events in a diary
Later memories can be objectively compared to the original account of the events in the diary entries
Describe Linton’s (1975) classic diary study
- Over 5 years, wrote 2 events a day in her diary and would then test herself on these memories
- Findings: The more times you have been tested on the same memory the better you are able to remember them again as the retention of the memory is strengthened by retrieval
Describe Wagenaar’s (1986) classic diary study
- Kept a diary for 6 years, writing down 4 features/cues to events & recorded 2400 incidents
- Then tested memory by cueing with 1-3 of the cues
- Findings: the ‘when’ cue is least efficient, recall proved an often difficult/unpleasant task, some events could not be remembered at all
Describe Brewer’s (1988) diary method with random sampling
- Providing P’s with a beeper & tape recorder, beeper goes off at random times & P’s required to record details about what was occurring at a given time
Findings: Events were less memorable than the classic method so much lower recall
Describe Brewer’s (1988) diary method with random sampling
- Providing P’s with a beeper & tape recorder, beeper goes off at random times & P’s required to record details about what was occurring at a given time
Findings: Events were less memorable than the classic method so much lower recall
Describe Conway et al.’s (1996) diary method with random sampling
- Recorded events & thoughts in diary
- Recognised actual events from fake memories which were interjected with the real ones
- P’s had to categorise memory as either : remembered if it was accompanied by a feeling of recollecting the initial experience or known if the memory was only familiar to them, without recollection
Findings: True events recollected more than fake ones
Events 2x more likely to be re
Describe the memory probe method as developed by Galton (1879)
- Recorded memories that he associated with 75 cue words (tried to recall a memory that linked to the word) & repeated this 4x
Findings: only came up with 298 events for 505 ideas
