My memory: A study of autobiographical memory over six years

Abstract

This paper describes a study on the recall of 2400 events from the author's daily life, recorded during a period of 6 years. One feature of the study is that all events were recorded by means of four aspects, viz., what the event was, who was involved, and where and when it happened. All events were scaled for saliency, emotional involvement, and pleasantness. Recall was cued by different combinations of the recorded aspects. For instance, given what, the task was to reproduce who, where, and when. Given who and when, the task was to reproduce what and where. This technique enlarges M. Linton's (1975, in D. A. Norman & D. E. Rumelhart (Eds.), Explorations in cognition (chap. 14), San Francisco: Freeman) insights into the organization of autobiographical memory. Pleasant events were better recalled than unpleasant events. An analysis of the effectiveness of cue combinations showed that, in the organization of autobiographical memory, temporal information functions in a different manner than information about what, who, and where. Although the number of irretrievable events can rise to about 20%, there is some evidence that in fact none of these events was completely forgotten.