Memory tasks are often classified as semantic or episodic, but recent research shows that these types of memory are highly interactive. Category fluency, for example, is generally considered to reflect retrieval from semantic memory, but behavioral evidence suggests that episodic memory is also involved: participants frequently draw on autobiographical experiences while generating exemplars of ...

Patients with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy from hippocampal origin and patients with unilateral surgical excision of an epileptic focus located in the medial temporal lobe were compared to healthy controls on a version of the Autobiographical Interview (AI) adapted to assess memory for event-specific and generic personal episodes. For both types of episodes, patients with unilateral (left ...

A total of 30 undergraduates recalled the same 20 autobiographical memories at two sessions separated by 2 weeks. At each session they dated their memories and rated them on 18 properties commonly studied in autobiographical memory experiments. Individuals showed moderate stability in their ratings on the 18 scales (r approximately .5), with consistency of dating being much higher (r = .96). Th...

The authors examined the impact of posthypnotic amnesia on the accessibility and quality of personal memories. High, medium,and low hypnotizable individuals recalled two autobiographical episodes and rated those memories. During hypnosis, subjects were given a posthypnotic amnesia suggestion that targeted one of the episodes. After hypnosis, they recalled and rated their memories of the episode...

This preliminary study tackles the assessment and treatment of autobiographical memory (AbM) in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RR-MS) patients. Our aim was to investigate cerebral activation changes, following clinical improvement of AbM due to a cognitive training based on mental visual imagery (MVI). We assessed AbM using the Autobiographical Interview (AI) in eight patients and 15 c...

BACKGROUND There is a growing body of literature showing individuals with depression and other trauma-related disorders (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder) recall more overgeneral and less specific autobiographical memories compared to normal participants. Although the mechanisms underlying overgeneral memory are quite clear, the search strategy operated within the autobiographical knowledge ...

Conclusions about the duration of hippocampal contributions to our autobiographical record of personal episodes have come under intense scrutiny in recent years. Interpretation is complicated by such factors as extent and site of lesions as well as test sensitivity. We describe the case of an amnesic person, K.C., with large, bilateral hippocampal lesions who figured prominently in the developm...

Current views about the organization of human memory make strikingly different predictions about the integrity of remote autobiographical memory following damage to the medial temporal lobe. We have carried out a detailed analysis of narrative content in memory-impaired patients for whom neuropsychological and neuroanatomical information is available. All eight patients were able to recall deta...

Autobiographical memory is commonly impaired in Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, little is known about the very recent past which is though highly important in daily life adaptation. In addition, the impact of sleep disturbances, also frequently reported in AD, on the consolidation, and retrieval of autobiographical memories remains to be assessed. Using an adaptation of the TEMPau task, we i...

The story of our lifetime - our narrative self - is constructed from our autobiographical memories. A central claim of social psychology is that this narrative self is inherently social: When we construct our lives, we do so in a real or imagined interaction. This predicts that self-referential processes which are involved in recall of autobiographical memories overlap with processes involved i...