Organization in autobiographical memory

Regret as autobiographical memory

“…The studies of prospective thought by Newby-Clark and Ross (2003) and D"Argembeau and Van der Linden (2004) explicitly requested specific, episodic events, whereas participants in the present studies freely recalled whatever came to mind, and what came to mind tended to be general. As Conway (1992) has suggested, this level of representation is the most cognitively efficient and provides easiest access to the autobiographical memory knowledge base, and events at this level are brought to mind more easily during memory retrieval (Conway & Bekerian, 1987).…”

“…Specific memories take longer to retrieve in response to affect cues than they do to activity and object cues (Robinson, 1976) or lifetime periods (Conway & Bekerian, 1987), and although Linton (1986) placed valence at the top of her hierarchy, she found emotion labels themselves to be very poor memory cues, as others have also found (Beike, Adams & Wirth-Beaumont, 2007;Reiser, Black & Abelson, 1985).…”

“…A lifetime period might also encapsulate an attitude deemed important to the development of the self, such as a particular period remembered as being "a difficult time" (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Lifetime periods are known to be superior cues, facilitating quick access to specific events in the autobiographical memory knowledge base (Brown, Shevell & Rips, 1986;Conway & Bekerian, 1987). Barsalou (1988) observed that many of his participants used these extended events to structure their descriptions, sketching out a sequence of extended events which were subsequently returned to and fleshed out in detail.…”

“…Events at this level may represent composite memories abstracted from many related experiences, described as categoric ("Times I have fallen downstairs"; Williams & Dritschel, 1992) or summarised ("late night parties"; Barsalou, 1988) events. Extended events might feature self-contained personal histories ("holiday with Jenny"; Conway & Bekerian, 1987) which Schooler and Herrmann (1992) call episodes and which Linton (1986) refers to as both episodes and events. Another type of general event is made up of multiple superimposed instances of a single episode which Neisser (1981) termed repisodes.…”

“…Events at this level have been called details (Linton, 1986;Tulving, 1972), moments (Schooler & Herrmann, 1992) or phenomenological records (Conway, 1992). What characterises events at this level is that they are typically accompanied by imagery and other perceptual details (Brewer, 1986;Rubin, 1996) and although such events do not usually make effective retrieval cues under normal circumstances (Conway & Bekerian, 1987;Reiser et al, 1985) they may be vividly remembered when they concern exceptionally shocking (Brown & Kulik, 1977) or personally important (Pillemer, 1998;Rubin & Kozin, 1984) events. Neisser (1988) describes the organisation of autobiographical knowledge in similar terms to Barsalou (1988), though he chooses the ecologically derived term "nested" to describe how one event can be nested within another.…”