A Basic-Systems Approach to Autobiographical Memory

Memory for complex everyday events involving vision, hearing, smell, emotion, narrative, and language cannot be understood without considering the properties of the separate systems that process and store each of these forms of information. Using this premise as a starting point, my colleagues and I found that visual memory plays a central role in autobiographical memory: The strength of recollection of an event is predicted best by the vividness of its visual imagery, and a loss of visual memory causes a general amnesia. Examination of autobiographical memories in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suggests that the lack of coherence often noted in memories of traumatic events is not due to a lack of coherence either of the memory itself or of the narrative that integrates the memory into the life story. Rather, making the traumatic memory central to the life story correlates positively with increased PTSD symptoms. The basic-systems approach has yielded insights into autobiographical memory’s phenomenology, neuropsychology, clinical disorders, and neural basis. KEYWORDS—autobiographical memory; recollection; neuropsychology; posttraumatic stress disorder Autobiographical memories are episodic memories: recollected events that belong to an individual’s past. As studied by cognitive psychologists, autobiographical memories involve far more complex situations than do laboratory memories. In a typical episodic memory experiment in a laboratory, the events to be remembered are words or pictures shown on a computer screen during a brief session. They usually involve only one sensory modality (e.g., sight or hearing); show little variation in spatial, temporal, emotional, and narrative content or context; and have hardly any personal relevance. The events that are recalled as autobiographical memories are typically multimodal (involving vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and body sense or kinesthesis); they vary in spatial, temporal, emotional, and narrative content and context; and they have personal relevance. The relative complexity of real-life situations suggests that studies of autobiographical memory require additional theoretical and methodological considerations that are not needed in the typical laboratory study. Similar complexities exist whenever any real-world stimuli, rather than simplified laboratory stimuli, are studied (Rubin, 1995). The following systems play a role in autobiographical memory: individual senses (especially vision, hearing, and smell); a multimodal spatial system, which notes the location of objects and people; emotion; language; a narrative system that keeps track of causal relations but that need not use language (Rubin, Schrauf, & Greenberg, 2003; Schrauf & Rubin, 2000); and an explicit memory system that coordinates or binds information from the other systems. Each of these systems has its own processes, forms of organization, and roles with respect to memory. Each system is well documented by evidence from cognitive-behavioral studies, individual differences research, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and neuroimaging. And each plays a different role in autobiographical memory. One implication of the fact that multiple systems are involved in autobiographical memory is that the self is not a single entity (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000); rather, it is distributed among the individual systems. The continuity of the self emerges from the continuity of these separate systems and their interaction with each other and the world. In addition, much that people ‘‘remember’’ as part of their life story is really shared cultural knowledge about the life course. This shared knowledge can often be attributed to cultural expectations, rather than to an individual’s autobiographical memory (Berntsen & Rubin, 2004). This article addresses implications of these observations for the phenomenology (subjective experience), neuropsychology, psychopathology, and neuroimaging of autobiographical memory.