The episodicity of verbal reports of personally significant autobiographical memories: vividness correlates with narrative text quality more than with detailedness or memory specificity.

Tilmann Habermas,Verena Diel

doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00110

Abstract

How can we tell from a memory report whether a memory is episodic or not? Vividness is required by many definitions, whereas detailedness, memory specificity, and narrative text type are competing definitions of episodicity used in research. We explored their correlations with vividness in personally significant autobiographical memories to provide evidence to support their relative claim to define episodic memories. In addition, we explored differences between different memory types and text types as well as between memories with different valences. We asked a lifespan sample (N = 168) of 8-, 12-, 16-, 20-, 40-, and 65-year-olds of both genders (N = 27, 29, 27, 27, 28, 30) to provide brief oral life narratives. These were segmented into thematic memory units. Detailedness of person, place, and time did not correlate with each other or either vividness, memory specificity, or narrative text type. Narrative text type, in contrast, correlated both with vividness and memory specificity, suggesting narrative text type as a good criterion of episodicity. Emotionality turned out to be an even better predictor of vividness. Also, differences between narrative, chronicle, and argument text types and between specific versus more extended and atemporal memories were explored as well as differences between positive, negative, ambivalent, neutral, contamination, and redemption memory reports. It is concluded that temporal sequentiality is a central characteristic of episodic autobiographical memories. Furthermore, it is suggested that the textual quality of memory reports should be taken more seriously, and that evaluation and interpretation are inherent aspects of personally significant memories.

Highlights

We first sketch the conceptual commonalities and divergences between these three concepts: episodic memory, autobiographical memory, and narrative
We have demonstrated narrative analyses of the textual surface of autobiographical memories of a more differentiated linguistic kind elsewhere (e.g., Habermas et al, 2009b), which might well increase the correlation of narrativity measures with vividness
Detailedness of place and time were highest in memory reports covering long life periods and in chronicles, suggesting that not so much memories of very specific events but rather summary reports of long stretches of life, like one’s time in elementary school, require detailed local and temporal background information

Summary

Introduction

We first sketch the conceptual commonalities and divergences between these three concepts: episodic memory, autobiographical memory, and narrative. Later when Tulving (1983, 1985) moved on to study neurologically impaired patients, he radically shifted the reference of the term episodic memory to include not just the knowledge of something one has learned, and the remembering of the when and where of learning, and to events of one’s life. At the same time he tied the remembering of past experiences to a specific phenomenal quality, autonoetic consciousness. He defined it as an immediate awareness that the remembered episode has been personally experienced. The term defines the experience of having an extended existence in time, or a sense of personal continuity (for a narrative critique of this claim see Habermas and Köber, in press). Wheeler et al (1997) further specified that the episodic memory system enabled

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