Question

In a paragraph summarize the chapter Autobiographical Memory

read the slides and summarize the chapter and ALSO MENTION IN THE CHAPTER WHAT YOU FOUND MOST INTERESTING AND WHY

Autobiographical Memory Characteristics Levels of representation Life narrative Emotions Memory over time

Answer 1

Autobiographical memory is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual's life, based on a combination of episodic (personal experiences and specific objects, people and events experienced at particular time and place) and semantic (general knowledge and facts about the world) memory.The hippocampus, located in the brain's temporal lobe, is where episodic memoriesare formed and indexed for later access. Episodic memories are autobiographical memories from specific events in our lives, like the coffee we had with a friend last week.Autobiographical memory refers to memory for one's personal history (Robinson, 1976). Examples might include memories for experiences that occurred in childhood, the first time learning to drive a car, or even one's Social Security number or home address.Autobiographical memory is that uniquely human form of memory that moves beyond recall of experienced events to integrate perspective, interpretation, and evaluation across self, other, and time to create a personal history. To put it succinctly, autobiographical memory is memory of the self interacting with others in the service of both short-term and long-term goals that define our being and our purpose in the world.Autobiographical knowledge encompasses far more than memory: It includes statements, propositions, declarations, and beliefs about the self, often accompanied by generic and/or specific (mainly visual) images of details of prior experience. Autobiographical knowledge is distinct from sensory perceptual episodic memories, which represent details of actual experience (Conway, 2001). In the formation of an autobiographical memory, autobiographical knowledge becomes linked to episodic memories (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Memory formation leads to recollective experience, a sense or feeling of the self in the past (Tulving, 1985; Wheeler, Stuss, and Tulving, 1997), and attention turns inward to the autobiographical memory and, perhaps, to other episodic memories and autobiographical knowledge. Of course, full autobiographical memory formation does not have to take place, and autobiographical knowledge and episodic memory can be processed independently.Brain injury can impair autobiographical memory in various ways (Conway and Fthenaki, 2000). Injuries to regions of the frontal lobes often lead to a clouding or loss of detailed memories. In more extreme cases patients may confabulate, constructing autobiographical knowledge into plausible but false memories. Patients with damage to the temporal lobes and underlying structures in the limbic system, especially the hippocampal formation, may lose the ability to form new memories while retaining access to at least some preinjury memories. Those with damage to posterior regions of the brain, regions involved in visual processing (occipital lobes) may lose the ability to generate visual images of the past and, because of this, become amnesic. Their amnesia occurs because the episodic content of autobiographical memories is predominantly encoded in the form of visual images. When the ability to generate visual images is compromised or lost because of brain damage, then access to specific details of the past held in episodic images is also lost.