The Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART): A Measure of Individual Differences in Autobiographical Memory

Abstract

We introduce the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART) to examine individual differences in how well people think they remember personal events. The ART comprises seven theoretically motivated and empirically supported interrelated aspects of recollecting autobiographical memories: reliving, vividness, visual imagery, scene, narrative coherence, life-story relevance, and rehearsal. Desirable psychometric properties of the ART are established by confirmatory factor analyses demonstrating that items probing each of the seven components form well-defined, yet highly correlated, factors that are indicators of a single underlying second-order factor. The ART shows high test-retest reliability over delays averaging three weeks and correlates meaningfully with a test of different categories of memory. Overall, the findings document that autobiographical recollection is a dimension that varies among individuals. The ART forms a reliable and easily administered autobiographical memory test that will help to integrate autobiographical memory research with fields generally concerned with individual differences, such as health and personality psychology.

On the relationship between autobiographical episodic memory and spatial navigation

“…We first replicated findings from previous reports using the SAM (Palombo et al, 2013) showing that self-reported spatial navigation ability is independent from episodic and semantic memory and future autobiographical thinking when analyzed in a multidimensional space (see also Berntsen, Hoyle, & Rubin, 2019). While there is shared variance in overall spatial navigation and memory abilities, as evidenced by the first dimension in the PCA and PLSC AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EPISODIC MEMORY AND NAVIGATION 13 analyses (likely owing to the positive manifold; Spearman, 1925), spatial navigation is orthogonal to episodic memory and future thinking in the second dimension.…”

“…An implication of this view might be that strong navigation abilities correspond to better episodic memory. While little research exists to address this possibility, some evidence suggests that this is not the case (Berntsen, Hoyle, & Rubin, 2019;Clark et al, 2019;Palombo, Williams, Abdi, & Levine, 2013).…”

On the relationship between trait autobiographical episodic memory and spatial navigation

“…The first dimension, explaining 27.18% of the variance, reflected overall high memory abilities across the domains. We previously demonstrated that the episodic and semantic items from Dimension 1 can be dissociated as they differentially relate to gender, mood, and memory performance (Palombo et al, 2013; see also Armson et al, 2020;Berntsen et al, 2019;Coutanche, Koch, & Paulus, 2020;Sheldon et al, 2016). We therefore treated these sets of items as distinct in subsequent analyses.…”

“…An implication of this view might be that strong navigation abilities correspond to better episodic memory. While little research exists to address this possibility, some evidence suggests that this is not the case (Berntsen, Hoyle, & Rubin, 2019;Clark et al, 2019).…”

Web-Based Assessment of the Phenomenology of Autobiographical Memories in Young and Older Adults

“…In this regard, Luchetti, Rossi, Montebarocci, and Sutin [ 4 ] have tested the continuity of autobiographical memory phenomenology across memories and over time (i.e., 4 week period) and they could show a moderate stability in phenomenology ratings over time (median correlation > 0.40), irrespective of memory contents, and especially for dimensions such as emotional intensity and visual perspective. In a similar vein, recently Berntsen, Hoyle and Rubin [ 25 ] developed a new measure of individual differences in autobiographical remembering, the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART), and found a high stability (overall correlations over > 0.70) of seven aspects of recollecting ABMs over time (a delay between one and eight weeks).…”