Autobiographical memory: Outline the self-memory system model

Autobiographical Memory

 Properties:

  • Events of personal significance
  • Complex events
  • Extends over many years
  • Involves some semantic content – More sensitive to loss in amnesia
  • Flashbulb memories – vivid, long lasting, often highly detailed, emotional
  • Autobiographical memory across the lifespan
  • Childhood/infantile amnesia – few memories before 3
  • Reminiscence bump – high number of memories formed between 10-30
  • Recency effects – slightly higher density of recent events

Self-Memory System Model (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2002)

 Autobiographical memory knowledge base

  • Lifetime periods
  • General events
  • Event-specific knowledge

 Working self

–     Goals

  • Retrieval of memories – direct or generative

Eyewitness memory: explain how the accuracy and reliability of eyewitness memory can be improved

  • Catalogue of effects related to a type of episode
  • Pre and post event information e.g. Misinformation effect (Loftus and Palmer, 1974) o Source amnesia, reconsolidation
  • Weapon focus (Loftus et al., 1987) o Weapon vs cheque, affects vividness, detail of weapon but not other parts of the scene
  • Own age and race bias

 Methods to improve eyewitness testimony:

  • Mental reinstatement of environment
  • Report any details that occur
  • Describe in different orders/from different time points
  • Describe from describe viewpoints

Prospective memory: Compare and contrast the PAM and multi-process models of prospective memory

Prospective Memory

 Memory of things to do in the future

PAM Model (Smith and Bayen, 2005)

 2 part process model preparatory attentional and memory process

  • Monitoring process – uses resources from intention formation until the action is performed
  • Retrospective-memory process – to recall the content of the action

Multi-Process Theory

 (Einstein and McDaniel, 2005) – multiple cognitive resources used as appropriate

–     Low cognitive load when ongoing task involves prospective cues; the cue and action are associated; the cue is salient; the action is simple

 Scullin et al. (2013) – dynamic multi-process framework

  • Monitoring – top-down attentional control to search for cues
  • Spontaneous retrieval – bottom-up triggered by cue o Expectations about cue determine which is used

Explain how autobiographical and prospective memory are implicated in psychopathology

  • Plays a role in encoding and recall
  • Encoding specificity
  • Attentional bias