Recurrent involuntary memories are autobiographical memories that come to mind with no preceding retrieval attempt and that are subjectively experienced as being repetitive. Clinically, they are classified as a symptom of posttraumatic stress disorder. The present work is the first to systematically examine recurrent involuntary memories outside clinical settings. Study 1 examines recurrent inv...

In December 1905, eight years before he published the first volume of“In Search of LostTime”,Marcel Proust entered a sanatorium to follow a six-week treatment for “neurasthenia” under the care of Dr Paul Sollier who, along with Babinski, was considered the cleverest pupil of Charcot. Following Charcot’s wish, Sollier had studied memory in depth,and he used this knowledge to provoke emotional su...

Studies suggest that general control deficits and elevated affect intensity in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) extend beyond memory for the index trauma. However, few researchers have pursued this possibility experimentally by examining novel events. We used an experimental design to measure frequency characteristics of involuntary memories over time. Veterans with without PTSD saw picture...

The present study showed that there are two distinctive processes underlying oculomotor capture by abrupt onset. When a visual mask between the cue and the target eliminates the unique luminance transient of an onset, the onset still attracts attention in a top-down fashion. This memory-based prioritization of onset is voluntarily controlled by the knowledge of target location. But when there i...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Intrusive memories appear to enter consciousness via involuntary rather than deliberate recollection. Some clinical accounts of PTSD seek to explain this phenomenon by making a clear distinction between the encoding of sensory-based and contextual representations. Contextual representations have been claimed to actively reduce intrusions by anchoring encoded perceptual...

Percepts and action-related urges often enter consciousness insuppressibly. The Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT) was developed to investigate how high-level cognitions (e.g., subvocalizations), too, can enter consciousness in this manner. Limitations of the paradigm include (a) that no data have confirmed subjects' introspections about the involuntary subvocalizations, and (b) that, in everyday lif...

Memories of past events often come to mind spontaneously, that is, without any preceding goal-directed search process. Such memories (termed ‘involuntary’ in the adult literature) have been studied extensively adults. However, little is known about how spontaneous recollections may appear children's everyday lives. To date, only a single diary study has conducted. We examined three-year-olds' (...