The procedure in this study of autobiographical memory after forty years had three phases: uncued recall of experiences of 1978 to 1980, recall cued by descriptions made in 1979 of selected events, and recall cued by a diary written between 1978 and 1980. The schema theory of autobiographical memory describes memory of individual experiences as…

Transition theory posits that autobiographical memories are organized by major life transitions, which is often supported by the Living-in-History effect that occurs when people frequently refer to public events to support their date estimates of personal events. In the present study, 52 Chinese older adults in Hong Kong recalled autobiographical…

Previous research with adults has shown mixed findings regarding the correlation between specificity and detailedness within autobiographical memories, and their associations with depressive symptoms. However, minimal research has tested these links in adolescents, despite the importance of this developmental period. The present investigation…

Our aim in the current study was to examine how different diary methods might impact the results of involuntary memory studies. We compared three different commonly used diary methods, record all memories experienced per day, record up to two memories per day, or record only the first two per day. Results showed that the record-all group had the…

Past research has shown that trauma-exposed refugee people frequently report less specific autobiographical memories, but the characteristics of their future episodic thinking remain largely unexplored. This study investigated the specificity and emotional valence of autobiographical memory and future episodic thinking produced by 120 Rohingya…

Although small children have autobiographical memories, as they grow, they forget its specific details. Although this forgetting is common in early childhood, the presence of effective cues may help recall autobiographical memories. This study examines the effect of verbal and visual cues on the long-term maintenance of a school trip…

Events always unfold in a spatial context, leading to the claim that it serves as a scaffold for encoding and retrieving episodic memories. The ubiquitous co-occurrence of spatial context with events may induce participants to generate a spatial context when hearing scenarios of events in which it is absent. Spatial context should also serve as an…

Using a novel autobiographical think/no-think procedure (ATNT; a modified version of the think/no-think task), 2 studies explored the extent to which we possess executive control over autobiographical memory. In Study 1, 30 never-depressed participants generated 12 positive and 12 negative autobiographical memories. Memories associated with…

Autobiographical memory was assessed in 24 children (12 male, 12 female, aged between 8 and 16 years) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and a comparison group of 24 typically developing (TD) children matched for age, IQ, gender and receptive language. Results suggested that a deficit in specific memory retrieval in the ASD group was more…

The objective of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT), which is widely used to measure overgeneral autobiographical memory in individuals with depression and a trauma history. Its factor structure and internal consistency have not been explored in a clinical sample. This study examined the…

In two experiments autobiographical memories from childhood were recalled to cue words naming common objects, locations, activities and emotions. Participants recalled their earliest specific memory associated with each word and dated their age at the time of the remembered event. A striking and specific finding emerged: age of earliest memory was…

The ability to mentally simulate possible futures ("episodic future thinking") is of fundamental importance for various aspects of human cognition and behavior, but precisely how humans construct mental representations of future events is still essentially unknown. We suggest that episodic future thoughts consist of transitory patterns…

This article reviews research on (a) autobiographical episodic and semantic memory, (b) the self-reference effect, (c) memory for the actions of self versus other (the self-enactment effect), and (d) non-autobiographical episodic memory in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and provides a theoretical framework to account for the bidirectional…

In 6 experiments, the authors investigated list-method directed forgetting of recently recalled autobiographical memories. Reliable directed forgetting effects were observed across all experiments. In 4 experiments, the authors examined the impact of memory valence on directed forgetting. The forget instruction impaired recall of negative,…