Autobiographical memories are a key component of our identity. Here, in the light of Cuervo-Lombard and colleagues' paper in this issue, we review impairments in autobiographical memory in schizophrenia and the association between autobiographical memory and outcome in the disorder. We also discuss whether these deficits are specific to schizophrenia and a possible link with traumatic events.

Memory for complex everyday events involving vision, hearing, smell, emotion, narrative, and language cannot be understood without considering the properties of the separate systems that process and store each of these forms of information. Using this premise as a starting point, my colleagues and I found that visual memory plays a central role in autobiographical memory: The strength of recoll...

The early development of autobiographical memory is a useful case study both for examining general relations between language and memory, and for investigating the promise and the difficulty of interdisciplinary research in the cognitive sciences of memory. An otherwise promising social-interactionist view of autobiographical memory development relies in part on an overly linguistic conception ...

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by a dysfunctional processing of autobiographical memories. We review the following core domains of deficit: systematic biases favoring materials of negative emotional valence; diminished access and response to positive memories; a recollection of overgeneral memories in detriment of specific autobiographical memories; and the role of ruminative ...

Compared to adults, relatively little is known about autobiographical memory and the ability to imagine fictitious and future scenarios in school-aged children, despite the importance of these functions for development and subsequent independent living. Even less is understood about the effect of early hippocampal damage on children's memory and imagination abilities. To bridge this gap, we dev...

College students generated autobiographical memories from distinct emotional categories that varied in valence (positive vs. negative) and intensity (high vs. low). They then rated various perceptual, cognitive, and emotional properties for each memory. The distribution of these emotional memories favored a vector model over a circumplex model. For memories of all specific emotions, intensity a...

There is accumulating evidence that reaction times (RTs) can be used to detect recognition of critical (e.g., crime) information. A limitation of this research base is its reliance upon small samples (average n = 24), and indications of publication bias. To advance RT-based memory detection, we report upon the development of the first web-based memory detection test. Participants in this resear...

There is evidence that specificity of autobiographical memory (AM) retrieval is impaired by cortisol. However, it is unknown whether glucocorticoids differentially influence the retrieval of recent versus remote AMs. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of cortisol on AM retrieval, in terms of memory specificity, with respect to remoteness of the retrieved memo...

The representation of autobiographical memory is distributed over a network of brain structures, with the medial temporal lobe (MTL) at its epicenter. Some believe that, over time, all memories become independent of their MTL component ("consolidation theories"). Others have suggested that this is true only of semantic memory, while episodic aspects of autobiographical memories are dependent on...

Although problems with remembering significant events from the past (e.g. holidays, weddings, etc.) have been reported previously in patients with transient epileptic amnesia (TEA), to date there have been no detailed studies of autobiographical memory in patients with this disorder. To investigate this issue, a 68-year-old right-handed man (R.G.) who suffered from TEA and reported significant ...