Spontaneous metacognitive experiences and involuntary memories in the laboratory.

Preoccupation priming: How repetitive thinking can influence our involuntary memories.

Abstract In this article, we discuss aesthetic encounters with works of visual art where the participants went through episodes where involuntary memories emerged regarding adverse experiences of their childhood. These aesthetic experiences were of great intensity and depth, accompanied by thought, affect, and somatic disturbances. Our material was collected through semistructured phenomenological interviews with a sample consisting of volunteers from Athens. We have chosen three of these cases to illustrate how this phenomenon unfolded. Despite the emotional intensity and the reexperience of negative emotions, all participants were left with an affectionate, bittersweet feeling towards the works of art.

ABSTRACT Studies have shown that involuntary autobiographical memories often have identifiable cues, which are rooted in a variety of experiences. Studies have also suggested that one’s activities and thoughts may also sometimes be related to these memories. Here, we examined a relatively large diary sample of involuntary memories (N = 123), where participants were asked to record their activities and thoughts along with their involuntary memories, and to decide if these activities and thoughts were related to these memories. The results showed that nearly two-thirds of the recorded involuntary memories were reported to be related to the activities and/or thoughts that coincided with them. Further, independent judges determined that activities and thoughts frequently overlapped conceptually with the memories, resulting in high inter-rater reliability estimates between the judges and the participants. We argue that the results suggest that activities and thoughts may have a priming role in the elicitation of involuntary memories.

ABSTRACT While much of human geography’s interest in memory is on collective, monumental, and voluntary memory, there is an emerging tendency to consider individual, ephemeral, and involuntary modes of memory as well. In this article, I introduce the distinct, but often overlooked, mode of involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM) to human geography. There are many aspects of IAMs which geographers might be interested in, including their nonlinear spatial and temporal dimensions and their significance to studies of affect, embodiment, and everyday life. If the ‘monument’ symbolizes much geographic work on memory, an IAM is something of a ‘counter-monument’ with an ephemeral presence and apparent irrelevance. But a turn towards individual memories, rather than necessarily signalling a turn away from the social, instead illustrates and critically interrogates the way both are being reimagined in contemporary geographic scholarship. To illustrate this further, I turn to the work of W.G. Sebald. Often read as contributing to the study of ‘postmemory’, Sebald’s novels also advance a posthumanist understanding of IAM, and chime with negative geographies. I conclude by suggesting future research directions on IAM and by reiterating how a focus on the individual and autobiographical can actually advance more-than-human understandings of space, subjectivity and the social.

ABSTRACT Diary and laboratory-based studies of Involuntary Autobiographical Memories (IAMs) have demonstrated the importance of verbal cues in bringing these memories to conscious awareness. These methods have been less frequently applied to the study of repetitive, unwanted Intrusive Memories (IMs), and less is known about the cues for this type of memory. The present studies represent the first investigation of verbal cueing for participants’ own IMs under controlled laboratory conditions. The results of Study 1 showed that it was possible to elicit IMs, nominated by non-clinical participants before the study, by engaging them in a simple vigilance task with a steady stream of incidental verbal cues. Moreover, more IMs (and spontaneous thoughts including IAMs) were elicited in the condition with incidental verbal cues than in the control condition with less meaningful stimuli (maths calculations). The findings were replicated and extended in Study 2, which demonstrated more clearly the importance of personalised cues, overlapping with the contents of nominated IMs, in eliciting self-nominated IMs in the laboratory. The findings have implications for ongoing theoretical debates about the relationship of IMs to IAMs and suggest that real-life IMs experienced by the general population can be studied as analogue intrusions present in PTSD.

Involuntary memory retrieval is a hallmark symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder and a frequent phenomenon in everyday autobiographical memory. However, the neural mechanisms that drive involuntary retrieval remain unclear. This study aims to elucidate how involuntary retrieval spontaneously initiates memory reactivation and how the reactivated neural representations differ in their content, distinctiveness and temporal compression from voluntary retrieval. Combining a visual half-field paradigm with electroencephalography recordings (EEG) in humans, we tracked reactivation of item-specific neural representations and sensory feature representations measured as representational similarity between different items sharing the same sensory feature – the visual field at encoding. We show that involuntary retrieval reactivated sensory feature-dependent yet item-unspecific representations via temporally extended memory replay, accompanied by rapid mid-frontal theta-power increases, indicating memory interference. This neural process differed from voluntary retrieval which recruited goal-directed memory search processes in prefrontal-medial temporal lobe theta-bands to reactivate temporally compressed item-specific representations devoid of visual field specific sensory feature representations at encoding. Our findings demonstrate that involuntary memories rely on distinct neural processes that access different representational formats compared to voluntary retrieval offering a nuanced understanding of episodic memory functioning relevant to psychological well-being.

Most studies on autobiographical memory in the psychosis continuum have focused exclusively on the voluntary (strategic) retrieval of past events. Findings have identified significant memory deficits in terms of impaired retrieval, reduced recollective qualities, and disturbed life-story narration, contributing to an impoverished sense of self. However, these findings diverge with more recent research that has revealed a strikingly different pattern of memory recall compared with the earlier literature. In contrast to a uniform impairment, certain features of autobiographical memory, specifically the prevalence of involuntary (spontaneously arising) autobiographical memories, is enhanced across the psychosis continuum from subclinical to clinical levels in schizophrenia. Findings have also shown that the recollective characteristics of autobiographical memories are either enhanced or impaired depending on the predominance of clinical symptoms—such as the predominance of positive or negative symptoms. We propose that these seemingly contradictory patterns of findings can be resolved by considering that the effects of psychosis vary (a) across different components of autobiographical memory and (b) as a function of variations in salient clinical symptoms. These insights are important for attaining a deeper understanding of psychosis and schizophrenia and for developing new forms of treatment that target specific impairments in different symptom profiles.

Memories can involuntarily come to mind out of nowhere. These spontaneous flashes often feel vivid and emotionally powerful. A new study in PLOS Biology reveals that involuntary and voluntary memory rely on distinct brain mechanisms.

The choice of the topic analyzed in our paper is motivated by the "generosity" that Gabriela Adameșteanu's novel shows, which is considered by most critics her "monumental" work. Starting from the aspects that investigate the registers of communication, we felt it necessary to bring into discussion the pragmatic discursive mechanisms, accommodating the theoretical references to some examples of text, as much as the size of the work allows us. Indeed, we addressed the concept of ”discursive space" and the discursive operations (or communicative functions) that can be carried out within them, supporting them also with examples of verbal acts emitted by different speakers, but bringing them in the foreground especially Vica Delcă and Ivona, since they are the conversational engine of the novel. They recount, evoke and give free rein to the flow of involuntary memory, commenting, appreciating, characterizing the present, but at the same time reviving people, places, moments and experiences from a past lived or reconfigured from memories, documents, diaries, objects or simply 'drawn' by their own imagination. Because theoretical conventions deprive narrative discourse of the support of trope-like resources, we have also considered the use of figures of speech in conversation and the particular status of the expressive in speech acts.

Abstract Background Involuntary memories are common in daily life and thought to play important functional roles, for example in prompting behaviour. People can experience involuntary memories not only of events they have actually experienced, but also of scenarios they have only imagined. However, this latter phenomenon, and the factors influencing its occurrence, are relatively unexplored. The current study aimed to investigate whether the vividness of an imagined scenario affects the likelihood of involuntary recall. Methods University students (N = 80) listened to descriptions of positive scenarios and imagined them, with half the sample randomly allocated to hearing extended versions of the scenarios hypothesised to induce more vivid imagery. Participants then recorded involuntary memories of the imagined scenarios in a three-day diary before returning to the lab. Results There was no effect of the experimental manipulation on vividness of the imagined scenarios or on the number of involuntary memories. However, participants who generated more vivid imagery of the scenarios recorded more involuntary memories. Exploratory analyses revealed further predictors of the quantity of involuntary memories experienced. Conclusions The results further our understanding of factors that may affect the likelihood of involuntary retrieval of previously-generated positive imagery, with both theoretical and potential clinical implications.

Research has shown that the activation of semantic memories leads to the activation of autobiographical memories. Known as semantic-to-autobiographical memory priming, this form of priming has been demonstrated to prime involuntary autobiographical memories with a wide variety of different stimuli (e.g., words, pictures, sentences, sounds, tactile stimuli, etc.). Our goal in the current study was to extend semantic-to-autobiographical priming to two unexplored processes, activities and thoughts. In Experiment 1, we explored priming from activities and thoughts by having participants imagine activities (e.g., imagine yourself exercising) and think about topics (e.g., think about holidays). These priming sessions occurred in between vigilance task trials. The vigilance task measures involuntary autobiographical memories by presenting participants with slides that contain lines and word phrases. Participants are instructed to note when slides contain vertical lines, as well as note if they experience spontaneous thoughts or memories. The slides used in our study contained phrases that were both related and unrelated to the primes. In Experiment 2, the priming phase and the vigilance task phase were separated by several minutes. The results of both experiments showed that primed participants produced more involuntary memories related to the content of the imagined activity and thought primes than control participants, who received imagined activity and thought primes that were unrelated to the vigilance task cues. The results support the idea that activities and thoughts can influence the production of involuntary autobiographical memories in everyday life. The results also support the idea that semantic-to-autobiographical priming is diverse.

Involuntary memories are thought to affect emotion, cognition, and behaviour, and it is often assumed that their impact is amplified when they are rich in mental imagery. However, this assumption has yet to be directly investigated. The current study tested a newly-developed paradigm designed to induce involuntary memories and provide a means to test the role of mental imagery directly. In a within-subject design, an unselected young adult (mostly student) sample (N = 53) participated in a lab-based study. Participants generated emotionally-valenced mental images or sentences via combining ambiguous pictures with positive or negative word captions. They then completed tasks designed to trigger involuntary memories of the previously generated images and sentences. Voluntary retrieval of the picture-word pairs was also assessed. Participants reported experiencing involuntary memories of previously generated images and sentences, but there were no detectable effects of mental imagery on measures of involuntary memory. However, participants recalled more word captions from picture-word pairs used to generate images than those used to generate sentences. Overall, the newly developed paradigm provides a means to test assumptions about the impact and functions of involuntary memories directly via experimental manipulation, opening up a number of opportunities for future research.

Supplemental Material for Involuntary thoughts in older versus younger adults: A multidisciplinary approach to investigating déjà vu, involuntary autobiographical memories, and unexpected thoughts.

Involuntary thoughts in older versus younger adults: A multidisciplinary approach to investigating déjà vu, involuntary autobiographical memories, and unexpected thoughts.

Abstract Purpose Metacognitive prediction of autobiographical remembering has long been overlooked. However, expected costs such as emotion dysregulation caused by negative memory recall and expected benefits such as improving mood induced by positive memory recall can affect autobiographical remembering. Such anticipations may contribute to abnormalities in autobiographical memory associated with emotional disorders, but those assessment tools have not yet been developed. Method In Study 1, we developed a self-report questionnaire MARQ (Meta-Autobiographical Remembering Questionnaire) in Japanese and examined its structural validity. In Study 2, test–retest reliability was assessed, and in Study 3, the convergent validity was tested. In Studies 4 and 5, we developed the English version of the MARQ, and tested its reliability and validity. In both versions, the MARQ consists of six factors: (a) emotion dysregulation and (b) avoidance of negative involuntary retrieval, (c) emotion dysregulation and (d) avoidance of negative voluntary retrieval, and (e) difficulty and (f) emotion dysregulation in positive voluntary retrieval. Results Across five studies, we confirmed the reliability and validity for the original Japanese version and translated English version. Convergent validation showed that these factors were related to depressive symptoms and posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and related cognitive processes. The results highlighted reduced expected benefits and increased expected costs of autobiographical remembering in individuals with higher levels of depressive symptoms and PTSS. Conclusion Emotion dysregulation and avoidance of involuntary negative memories may generalize to voluntary memory, and the assessment and intervention focusing on these processes would inform transdiagnostic approaches based on memory research.

Traumatic experiences are thought to alter memory acquisition and consolidation. Cognitive models of PTSD suggest that voluntary and involuntary memories after trauma can be independently addressed through interventions. The administration of oxytocin before exposure to a trauma film led to more intrusive (involuntary) memories than placebo. The effect of oxytocin on voluntary memory of the traumatic film, however, remains unclear. The current study aimed to assess whether intranasal oxytocin administration facilitates forced-choice recognition memory after a trauma film paradigm. We performed a pooled analysis of two randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies (N = 437) to assess the impact of intranasal oxytocin administration on declarative memory. Participants received 24 I.U. of oxytocin, either 40 minutes before a trauma film paradigm or immediately afterward. We applied a forced-choice recognition task seven days after the trauma film paradigm. The task comprised pre-, peri, and post-trauma film scene details. The administration of oxytocin did not affect recognition performance for any film scene (F(2, 401) = .49, p = .61). Participants remembered significantly more peri-traumatic film details compared to pre- and post-trauma details (F(1.72, 802) = 103.38, p <.001). Although the exogenous oxytocin administration before a trauma film has been shown to influence the acquisition of intrusive memories, it does not seem to affect the recognition memory of trauma film details. That aligns with cognitive models of PTSD, suggesting that voluntary and involuntary memory after trauma can be independently addressed through experimental interventions.

Research has shown that the activation of semantic memories leads to the activation of autobiographical memories. Known as semantic-to-autobiographical memory priming, this form of priming has been demonstrated to prime involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories with a wide variety of different stimuli (e.g., words, pictures, sentences, sounds, tactile stimuli, etc.). Our goal in the current study was to extend semantic-to-autobiographical memory priming to narrative processing. Participants read a short story that contained multiple prime words, and then they were treated to an involuntary autobiographical memory task (the vigilance task). Instead of the short story, control participants were given a task which required them to make judgments about the alphabetical status of letter strings (e.g., ABC, FGH, XTC), and they were subsequently treated to the vigilance task. The results showed that participants primed with the story produced more involuntary autobiographical memories with primed and unprimed content on the vigilance task than the control participants. The results further support the idea that semantic-to-autobiographical memory primes occurs with a diverse set of stimuli. The results also support the idea that semantic-to-autobiographical memory priming may play a significant role in the production of involuntary autobiographical memories in everyday life.

Involuntary autobiographical memories as a transdiagnostic factor in mental disorders.

“The Memorial Dinner” is a speculative essay that deals with the search for alternative ways of remembering and (re)imagining the past, especially (close) people, events, and relationships. After an unsuccessful attempt to find documentary evidence in archives about the life of her great‑grandmother Agatha, the author finally arrives at a spiritual gathering dedicated to the rituals of ancestral knowledge. The ceremonial gathering takes the form of an eclectic commemorative dinner, bringing together participants from different contexts and creating an atmosphere of connection. Quasi‑ritual actions experienced during the dinner result in the fusion of the participants’ memories of the deceased and trigger Victoria’s involuntary memories. This brings her closer to recognizing performative power as a productive tool for fusing imagination and memory and for creating sensory images of the past. Finally, the narratives and thoughts that emerge in the relational setting become fragile monuments of our past (or/and deceased), facilitating the liberation of feelings such as rebellion, acceptance, forgiveness, or affection, and building the potential for inner transformation and therefore ‑ relief.