Idei pentru partea teoretica [Psihologie Cognitiva]

Memoria Autobiografica - definitie, componente, caracteristici etc.

din Autobiograpical Memory - David Rubin [1. Introduction]

Autobiographical memory can be
said to include encoding, retention, and retrieval as measured in the laboratory.
Moreover, to the extent measured, these terms operate in autobiographical
memory much the way they do in the laboratory.


A person recalls an
autobiographical memory, but if that recalled memory is not recognized as
the person's own it will not add to the person's theory of self or sense of
continuity


The theoretical perspective of personality and social psychology speaks to
one of the central aspects of autobiographical memory. Autobiographical
memory is about the self; it is about such technical terms as self-theories,
self-reference, and identity (Barclay, Chap. 6). Autobiographical memory is
the source of information about our lives, from which we are likely to make
judgments about our own personalities and predictions of our own and, to
some extent, others' behavior. Autobiographical memory, however, also provides
a sense of identity and of continuity, a sense that can, but need not, be
lost along with the neuropsychological loss of other aspects of autobiographical
memory functioning (Baddeley & Wilson, Chap. 13; Butters & Cermak,
Chap. 14; Crovitz, Chap. 15).



Barclay's thesis is
that most autobiographical memories are reconstructions of past events, reconstructions
that are driven by highly developed self-schemata. He begins
by reviewing cases in which people believed their inaccurate memories to be
accurate. The errors in memory reviewed are not random but rather fit into
reasonable stories the rememberers might construct. Barclay then proceeds to
review the ways in which literary autobiographies are constructed and criticized.
Literary autobiographies, he says, "must convey precisely and honestly
the autobiographer's intentions"; they need not, in fact cannot, convey
an accurate record of the past. The events reported must be plausible and
consistent, not veridical. The psychological literature on the self is then summoned
to demonstrate that the forces acting to schematize autobiographical
memories are much the same as those forces acting on an autobiographer. If
Barclay's thesis and the evidence used to support it are correct, people should
be willing to recognize, as their own, memories that are not theirs and should
do so with increasing frequency as the events become more remote from and
more similar to actual occurrences in their lives. Barclay reports such data
from a group of students who kept diaries for him. His chapter provides
theory and data that help us understand the paradox of why we believe our
own memories to be true, yet know from extensive research that they cannot
be accurate.



. In Part IV, Brown, Shevell, and Rips and Robinson, however, indicate
that, at a deeper level, considering autobiographical memory as organized
along a time line may be a fundamental error. Rather than autobiographical
memory being organized along a time line, the time line may be
organized in terms of the events and schemata recorded in autobiographical
memory. When the confounding of the time line as measured by the calendar
and the temporal succession of events is teased apart, the temporal succession
of events is shown to have the greater role.




din Autobiograpical Memory - David Rubin [2. Autobiographical memory: a
historical prologue]

From the beginning biographers and historians
have used personal recollections to construe the individual and collective
past. The archival function of memory has often been given primary emphasis
in biographical and historical work. According to this view, life memories are
time capsules, records of an unrepeatable past. As such they can be used both
to recount the past and to teach lessons for the future.


din Autobiograpical Memory - David Rubin [3. What is autobiographical memory?]

In particular,
I think we can define autobiographical memory as memory for information
related to the self.

In brief, I intend to argue that the self is
composed of an experiencing ego, a self-schema, and an associated set of
personal memories and autobiographical facts.



din Theoretical perspectives on autobiographical memory


Over 100 years ago, Franees Galton began the empirical study of autobiographical
memory by devising a technique in whieh he explored the capacity for a eue word to elieit
the recollection of events from earlier life (Galton, 1883).



I would like to suggest that the term 'autobiographical memory' is used in at least
three different ways. (1) As a specific memory system with a separable neurological base,
(2) As a term describing knowledge and schemata that form the memorial basis of the self,
and (3) As the study of the processes and mechanisms whereby subjects recall and
recognise the events they have experienced in their lives. This includes not only the
important and emotionally-laden contributions to the structure of the self image, but also
such mundane issues as what they had for breakfast. or where they parked their car. All
three of these meanings reflect areas of importance, but typically involve rather different
questions. demanding different investigative techniques which makes their lumping
together under the term 'autobiographical memory' less than helpful. I will discuss the
three meanings in turn.


Tulving
himself suggested that episodic memory was synonymous with autobiographical memory,
and at least in his earlier papers suggested that this reflected the operation of a
psychologically and neurologically separable subsystem. Tulving's views have evolved
over the years, and it is now doubtful as to whether he would wish to defend the view that
semantic and episodic memory reflect totally different systems.


Episodic memory is usually regarded' as falling clearly within the category of explicit
or declarative memory, and in their recent neuropsychological text, McCarthy and
Warrington (1991) refer to this as "autobiographical memory". While this equation of
episodic and autobiographical memory is not in general use, it is sufficiently elose to
current terminology to be laken very seriously (c.f. Conway, 1990), particularly when
proposed by authors as distinguished as Warrington and McCarthy.

McCarthy and Warrington use the term autobiographical memory to refer to the ability
"to maintain a constantly changing and updated record of salient public and private events"
(McCarthy & Warrington, 1990, p.296).


McCarthy and Warrington do not appear to use this term to refer to semantic memory.
Hence, if I ask you where you went to school, or what your teachers were called, or who
your best friends were, these would presumably not count as autobiographical memory
since they are unlikely to be recalled on the basis of episodic memory. It is also doubtful
as to whether oft-repeated stories about one's past truly represent a recollection of the
initial incident, rather than an agglomeration of subsequent re-tellings, and hence many of
the episodes recounted as part of one's autobiography might also be excluded from the
term.

Hcnce, whilc I would accept the importance of separately conceptualising some system
such as episodie memory, and agree that it is related to personal experience, I would not
favour referring to it as autobiographical memory. Such usage is inconsistent with many
existing usages of the term to refer to "remembering" or "knowing" the facts of one's life,
and in addition is potentially misleading in applying the label to the recall of material that
would not typically be regarded as autobiographical. The term autobiographical memory
has not been used widely in this sense in the past; to adopt it at this stage would simply
lead to yet further terminological confusion.


One may contrast the McCarthy and Warrington neuropsychological use of the term
autobiographical memory with its use 10 refer to a person's recollection of earlier life in
their construction of a self-concept. Used in this sense, the term refers 10 a particuIar topic
to which memory may be applied; the resulting construction is likely to be strongly
influenced, not only by memorial factors, but also by emotions and by social factors
operating both at the time of the original experience, and at the time of recollection. This
leads on to the third interpretation of the term autobiographical memory, as those
processes and mechanisms involved in recollecting the events of one's life.


I assume that semantic memory comprises the residue of many such episodes. As
such it does not represent a separate memory system, but rather aseparate way of
retrieving information from the episodic system.


Where does autobiographical memory fit into this rather grandiose scheme? I would
suggest that personal awareness is the very essence of the episodie memory system, which
has the capacity to associate events that are consciously experienced at the same time. For
this reason, if for no other, autobiographical experience and memory He at the heart of a
central feature of human memory. We should distinguish here, however, between the seIf
as experiencer, and the self as the object of that experience. To regard the former as the
central feature of autobiographical memory results in the need to include the recollection of
any experienced event as autobiographical, as indeed McCarthy and Warrington propose.
As argued earlier, I regard this interpretation as too broad, and would prefer to use the tenn
'episodic memory' for this general capacity , reserving autobiographical memory for the
application of this capacity to recollections of subjects about themselves.

On this interpretation, events of particular relevance to oneself may be differentially
coded within a general semantic memory system. Occasionally, as in the previouslydescribed
case, lesions may occur which disturb that part of semantic memory concemed
with public events and history, together with other components of semantic memory,
while leaving that area responsible for storing information about one's own life relatively
intact.