Autobiographical Memory: What Has Happened in My Life • 205Autobiographical Memory: What Has Happened in My Life
Autobiographical memory (AM) has been defi ned as recollected events that belong to
a person’s past (Rubin, 2005). When we remember the events that make up the stories
of our life by using “mental time travel” to place ourselves back into a specifi c situ-
ation, we are experiencing AM. As we saw in Chapter 6, experiencing a memory by
using mental time travel is episodic memory. However, autobiographical memories can
also contain semantic components. For example, an AM of a childhood birthday party
might include images of the cake, people at the party, and games being played (episodic
memory); it might also include knowledge about when the party occurred, where your
family was living at the time, and your general knowledge about what usually happens
at birthday parties (semantic memory) (Cabeza & St. Jacques, 2007).
One of the factors that determines the relative proportions of episodic and semantic
components in AM is how long ago the event to be remembered occurred. Memories of
recent events that are rich in perceptual details and emotional content are dominated by
episodic memory. However, as we mentioned in Chapter 6 (page 159), episodic memories
can fade with time, leaving semantic memory. Thus, memories for more distant events
become more semantic. For example, I only vaguely remember learning to read, and
I have no memory of elementary school teachers and fellow students before the fourth
grade. I do, however, remember what school I went to, where my family lived, that I was
in about the second grade when I was learning to read, and that
the two main characters in my reading book were Dick and Jane.
My AM of these events, such as learning to read, that extend far
back in time is mainly semantic. Given this interplay of episodic
and semantic memory, we can defi ne AM as episodic memory
for events in our lives plus personal semantic memories of facts
about our lives.THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL NATURE OF AM
Autobiographical memories are far more complex than memory
that might be measured in the laboratory by asking a person
to remember a list of words. Autobiographical memories are
multidimensional because they consist of spatial, emotional,
and sensory components. The memory of patients who have
suffered brain damage that causes a loss of visual memory, but
without causing blindness, illustrates the importance of the sen-
sory component of AM. Daniel Greenberg and David Rubin
(2003) found that patients who had lost their ability to recog-
nize objects or to visualize objects, because of damage to visual
areas of the cortex, also experienced a loss of AM. This may
have occurred because visual stimuli were not available to serve
as retrieval cues for memories. But even memories not based on
visual information are lost in these patients. Apparently, visual
experience plays an important role in forming autobiographical
memories. (It would seem reasonable that for blind people, audi-
tory experience might take over this role.)
A brain scanning study that illustrates a difference between
AM and laboratory memory was done by Roberto Cabeza
and coworkers (2004). Cabeza measured the brain activation
caused by two sets of stimulus photographs—one set that the
participant took and another set that was taken by someone else
(● Figure 8.1). We will call the photos taken by the participant
A-photos, for “autobiographical photographs,” and the ones
taken by someone else L-photos, for “laboratory photographs.”●FIGURE 8.1 Photographs from Cabeza and coworkers’
(2004) experiment. A-photos (“autobiographical
photographs”) were taken by the participant; L-photos
(“laboratory photographs”) were taken by someone else.
(Source: R. Cabeza et al., “Brain Activity During Episodic Retrieval of
Autobiographical and Laboratory Events: An fMRI Study Using a Novel
Photo Paradigm,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1583–1594, 2004.)Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.