Event Cueing, Event Clusters, and the Temporal Distribution of Autobiographical Memories

This article provides an overview of a series of event-cueing experiments conducted to investigate how autobiographical memory is organized at the event level. In these experiments, participants ®rst generate a set of personal events (cueing events) and then respond to each by retrieving a second event memory (the cued event). Subsequently, relations between cued and cueing events are coded, and all events are dated and rated for importance. This approach has produced two general ®ndings. First, we have found that event memories are often embedded in narrative-like event clusters. Second, across experiments, we have observed large, systematic di€erences in the temporal distribution of the event pairs. In this article, we review evidence concerning the organizational importance of event clusters. We then examine the temporal distributions obtained from three representative experiments and account for the marked di€erences in these distributions by considering how task demands, memory structures, and response strategies a€ect retrieval from autobiographical memory. # 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.