Abstract
Autobiographical memory (AM), the recollection of personally-experienced events, has several adaptive functions and has been studied across numerous dimensions. We previously introduced two methods to quantify across the life span AM content (the amount and types of retrieved details) and the everyday occurrence of its recollection. The CRAM (cue-recalled autobiographical memory) test used naturalistic word prompts to elicit AMs. Subjects dated the memories to life periods and reported the numbers of details recalled across eight features (e.g., spatial detail, temporal detail, people, and emotions). In separate subjects, an experience sampling method quantified in everyday settings the frequency of AM retrieval and of mental representation of future personal events or actions (termed prospective memory: PM); these data permit evaluation of the temporal orientation of episodic recollection. We describe these datasets now publicly released in open access (CRAM: doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.10246958; AM-PM experience-sampling: doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.10246940). We also present examples of data mining, using cluster analyses of CRAM (14,242 AMs scored for content from 4,244 subjects). Analysis of raw feature scores yielded three AM clusters separated by total recalled content. Normalizing for total content revealed three classes of AM based on the relative contributions of each feature: AMs containing a relatively large number of details related to people, AMs containing a high degree of spatial information, and AMs with details equally distributed across features. Differences in subject age, memory age, and total content were detected across feature clusters. These findings highlight the value in additional mining of these datasets to further our understanding of autobiographical recollection.
Highlights
Autobiographical memory (AM), recollection of the subjective experience of life events, represents an important component of human cognition
We previously introduced two methods to independently measure across the life span AM content (Gardner et al, 2012; Gardner et al, 2015) and the naturalistic retrieval frequency of AM and prospective memory (PM) (Gardner & Ascoli, 2015)
Data from subjects were collected either in person under experimenter supervision or online unsupervised. Subjects included both unsolicited internet-browsing individuals (CRAM was indexed by popular search engines between 2013 and 2018) and those recruited from George Mason University staff, faculty, and students and the local community
Summary
Autobiographical memory (AM), recollection of the subjective experience of life events, represents an important component of human cognition. AM is thought to have several functions in everyday life (Pillemer, 1992; Bluck et al, 2005; Bluck & Alea, 2011; Klein, 2013; Szpunar et al, 2013) and numerous features of AM retrieval have been widely studied (e.g., Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Wagenaar, 1986; Berntsen & Rubin, 2012) Most relevant to this Data Report, convergent findings suggest that both the content contained in AM (the details retrieved during recollection) and AM retrieval frequency are essential aspects of memory and may interact to support recollection. Whereas younger subjects experienced PM as often as they did AM, older adults engaged in PM twice as frequently Together, these findings suggest both past- and futureoriented episodic thought constitute a substantial fraction of cognition, and reveal an age-associated shift in the temporality of episodic recollection. We describe these newly released datasets in detail and report novel cluster analyses of memory content (Anderson & Ascoli, 2019) to illustrate the potential utility of further mining of these data to facilitate a better understanding of AM and PM retrieval
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