Reminders of happy memories can bring back pleasant feelings tied to the original experience, suggesting an intrinsic value in reminiscing about the positive past. However, the neural circuitry underlying the rewarding aspects of autobiographical memory is poorly understood. Using fMRI, we observed enhanced activity during the recall of positive relative to neutral autobiographical memories in ...

Are elevated rates of false recall and recognition in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm associated with false autobiographical memories in everyday life? To investigate this issue, the authors recruited participants who reported improbable memories of past lives and compared their DRM performance with that of control participants who reported having lived only one life (i.e., their cu...

People are often risk averse when making decisions under uncertainty. When those decisions are based on past experience, people necessarily rely on their memories. Thus, what is remembered at the time of the choice should influence risky choice. We tested this hypothesis by priming memory for past outcomes in a simple risky-choice task. In the task, people repeatedly chose between a safe option...

Central aspects of emotional experiences are often well remembered at the expense of background details. Previous studies of such memory trade-offs have focused on memory after brief delays, but little is known about how these components of emotional memories change over time. We investigated the evolution of memory for negative scenes across 30 min, 12 daytime hours spent awake, and 12 nightti...

Despite his pointing this out, Nabuco’s own account of the abolition of slavery in Brazil constitutes the mainstream way of retelling the history of this movement. Most scholarship takes his memories as a departure point. As Nabuco observes, however, to rely on individual memories is a risky choice. Activists such as himself usually retell their stories, attributing teleology, coherence, and me...

Early adolescents recounted experiences when they felt ‘especially good’ or ‘especially bad’ about themselves in the past year. Consistent with prior research using adult participants, negative memories focused primarily on social themes, whereas positive memories also prominently included achievement themes. Girls described more social themes than did boys for both positive and negative memori...

Volitional movement is a hallmark for human behavior. How such well-intended concatenation of behaviors is achieved remains, however, elusive. In the present study, we hypothesized that visual memory of past motion trajectories may be used for selecting future behavior. Based on our memory prediction hypothesis, we designed motor planning experiments that generate new path when given a fixed go...

In the present article a model for memory retrieval of personal experiences for virtual agents is presented. It builds upon previous work and focuses on the effect memory retrieval can have on the agent’s emotional state. Memory retrieval is defined as an emotional re-appraisal of past experiences. The variation of intensity of such reexperience is explored by modeling two phenomena: downward s...

Memories are reconstructions of past events, not perfect recordings. These reconstructions can be accurate, but may also contain errors. Since the early 1900s, researchers have investigated memory processes in the laboratory and have demonstrated that reconstructions occur regardless of whether memories are retrieved after short or long periods. Reconstructive errors in memory retrieval have be...

BACKGROUND Studies show that individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) tend to recall autobiographical memories with decreased episodic specificity. A growing body of research has demonstrated that the mechanisms involved in recalling autobiographical memories overlap considerably with those involved in imagining the future. Although shared autobiographical deficits in remembering t...