Premium
Event cueing, event clusters, and the temporal distribution of autobiographical memories
Author(s) -
Brown Norman R.,
Schopflocher Donald
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-0720(199808)12:4<305::aid-acp569>3.0.co;2-5
Subject(s) - autobiographical memory , event (particle physics) , psychology , cued speech , cognitive psychology , set (abstract data type) , episodic memory , cognition , computer science , recall , neuroscience , physics , quantum mechanics , programming language
This article provides an overview of a series of event‐cueing experiments conducted to investigate how autobiographical memory is organized at the event level. In these experiments, participants first generate a set of personal events ( cueing events ) and then respond to each by retrieving a second event memory (the cued event ). Subsequently, relations between cued and cueing events are coded, and all events are dated and rated for importance. This approach has produced two general findings. First, we have found that event memories are often embedded in narrative‐like event clusters . Second, across experiments, we have observed large, systematic differences in the temporal distribution of the event pairs. In this article, we review evidence concerning the organizational importance of event clusters. We then examine the temporal distributions obtained from three representative experiments and account for the marked differences in these distributions by considering how task demands, memory structures, and response strategies affect retrieval from autobiographical memory. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.