Individual differences in autobiographical memory: a Danish version of the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART)

Abstract

Individual differences in autobiographical memory have become an area of growing research interest. Recently, the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART; Berntsen et al., 2019) was introduced. The ART measures individual differences in autobiographical memory along seven components: Vividness, narrative coherence, reliving, rehearsal, scene, visual imagery, and life story relevance. The ART is a useful and easily administered tool, but is so far not available in any of the Nordic languages. The aim of the present study was to provide a Danish translation of the ART and to provide correlations between the Danish ART and characteristics of randomly sampled memories (i.e. memories cued by words) in order to support the validity of the translation. First, the ART was translated into Danish. Then, 122 Danish adults filled out the Danish ART and rated the recollective qualities of three word cued autobiographical memories. The internal consistency was in line with findings on the original English version of the scale as were correlations between the Danish ART, Brief ART and the seven components of the ART. The Danish ART correlated positively with characteristics of the word cued memories corresponding to the seven components of the ART. Additional analyses demonstrated that the magnitude of these correlations were similar to those between ratings of individual memory items, supporting the validity of the ART as a trait-like measure of the recollective experience of autobiographical memory. The ART could be of interest to many areas of psychology and potential applications of the ART are discussed.