Visual imagery plays a fundamental role in autobiographical memory, but several aspects of this role remain unclear. We conducted three experiments to explore this relationship. In the first experiment, we examined the relation between the phenomenological properties of autobiographical memory and several measures of visual-imagery ability. We found no significant positive relation between imag...

Individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) tend to retrieve autobiographical memories with less episodic specificity, referred to as overgeneralised autobiographical memory. In line with evidence that autobiographical memory overlaps with one's capacity to imagine the future, recent work has also shown that individuals with PTSD also imagine themselves in the future with less episod...

One of the most enduring questions about long-term memory is how such a vast quantity of information is organized for efficient and reliable retrieval. Within semantic memory, the clustering of items in category generation tasks informs our understanding of organization. Bousefield (1953) defined a cluster as “a sequence of associates having an essential relationship between its members . . . [...

Autobiographical memory in amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI) is characterized by impaired retrieval of episodic memories, but relatively preserved personal semantic knowledge. This study aimed to identify (via FDG-PET) the neural substrates of impaired episodic specificity of autobiographical memories in 35 aMCI patients compared with 24 healthy elderly controls. Significant correlation...

A single case study recently documented one woman's ability to recall accurately vast amounts of autobiographical information, spanning most of her lifetime, without the use of practiced mnemonics (Parker, Cahill, & McGaugh, 2006). The current study reports findings based on eleven participants expressing this same memory ability, now referred to as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM...

The particularly high treatment gap in alcohol-dependence suggests the existence of important barriers to treatment decision and in particular difficulties in problem recognition. This study tested the relation between problem recognition and self-related memories. Forty-one recently detoxified alcohol-dependent individuals (AD) were compared to twenty alcoholic subjects that were abstinent for...

Research has revealed that clinical depression is related to reduced specificity and/or overgenerality in autobiographical memory. We set out to investigate this relationship by comparing depressed (n = 40) and nondepressed (n = 40) individuals not only in terms of autobiographical memory specificity/generality, but also in terms of narrative structure. Specificity was assessed with the Autobio...

New episodic memories are retained better if learning is followed by a few minutes of wakeful rest than by the encoding of novel external information. Novel encoding is said to interfere with the consolidation of recently acquired episodic memories. Here we report four experiments in which we examined whether autobiographical thinking, i.e. an 'internal' memory activity, also interferes with ep...

The frequency and characteristics of involuntary autobiographical memories were compared in 25 stable dysphoric and 28 non-dysphoric participants, using a new laboratory-based task (Schlagman & Kvavilashvili, 2008). Participants detected infrequent target stimuli (vertical lines) in a simple vigilance task and recorded any involuntary autobiographical memories that came to mind, mostly in respo...

Studies of childhood memory typically show that our earliest memories come from between three and four years of age. This finding is not universal, however. The age estimate varies across cultures and is affected by social influences. Research from the judgments and decision-making literature suggests that these estimates might also involve a judgment under uncertainty. Therefore, they might be...