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Our experiences in the world support memories not only of specific episodes but also of the generalities (the ‘gist’) across related experiences. It remains unclear how these two types of memories evolve and influence one another over time. 173 human participants encoded spatial locations from a distribution and reported both item memory (specific locations) and gist memory (center for the locations) across one to two months. After one month, gist memory was preserved relative to item memory, despite a persistent positive correlation between them. Critically, item memories were biased towards the gist over time; however, with a spatial outlier item, the local center excluding the outlier became the source of bias, instead of the reported center overweighting the outlier. Our results suggest that the extraction of gist is sensitive to the regularities of items, and that the gist starts to guide item memories over longer durations as their relative strengths change.

Memory is understood as a place of storage. We consider this model limited to understand the process of learning. Thus, we adopted the model that memory is understood as a meaning making reconstruction process. This reconstruction is characterized by some features, such as transformations, transferences, elaborations, and importations. This paper presents a case, in which two students try to solve questions about chemical substance by remembering information from prior sources and knowledge. The analysis showed that the construction of meanings occurs from modifications on memory by the emergence of remembering features (transformation, importation, transference, and elaboration). Thus, we have some clues how memory can regulate the meaning making of scientific concepts.

Toplumsal bellek, sosyal bilimlerin sosyoloji, tarih, antropoloji ve siyaset bilimi gibi çeşitli disiplinlerinde kapsamlı biçimde çalışılmıştır. Bu durum, terim hakkında çok çeşitli tanımlamaların ortaya çıkmasıyla sonuçlanmıştır. Toplumsal belleğin disiplinler arasında kabul gören bir tanımı olmasa da terimin tüm kullanımlarını bağlayan ortak zemin, toplumsal belleğin bir grup tarafından paylaşılan, sosyal bağlam ya da kültürel ürünler tarafından yeniden şekillendirilen ve grup üyelerinin sosyal kimliği üzerinde önemli rolü olan bir bellek formu olmasıdır. Bellek süreçleri, psikologların temel ilgi alanlarından biridir. Ancak ilginç bir biçimde, toplumsal belleğin sorularının psikoloji alanında sistematik olarak araştırılmasına henüz yeni başlanmıştır. Bu derlemenin amacı, bilişsel psikoloji alanındaki deneysel çalışmalardan elde edilen bulguların toplumsal belleğin sorularına uygulanmasıdır. Bu derleme özellikle sosyal etkileşimin belleğin yeniden yapılandırılmasındaki ve farklı bireylerin bellek temsillerinin birbirine yakınsayarak ortak bir geçmiş temsiline dönüşmesindeki rolüne yönelik deneysel çalışmalara odaklanmaktadır. Deneysel ortamda gerçek yaşamın basitleştirilmiş simülasyonlarını oluşturan bu çalışmalar, belleğin sosyal bulaşıcılığı, ortaklaşa hatırlama, sosyal bağlamda seçici hatırlama ve hatırlamaya bağlı unutma gibi paradigmaların toplumun ortak anılarının oluşumu ve hatırlanmasının altında yatan bilişsel mekanizmaların bir temsili olabileceğini ileri sürer. Derleme, bu çalışmaları inceledikten sonra, toplumsal bellek üzerine gerçekleştirilen deneysel ve betimleyici çalışmaların bulguları arasındaki paralelliklere odaklanacaktır. Derleme, son olarak, laboratuvar ortamındaki deneysel çalışmaların, toplumsal olaylara ilişkin anıların oluşumu ve hatırlanmasına yönelik genel prensipler sunarak, toplumsal belleğin altında yatan bilişsel mekanizmaların anlaşılmasına ilişkin katkı sunabileceği görüşüyle sonlanacaktır. Bu derleme, bilişsel psikoloji bakış açısını benimsemekle birlikte, çeşitli disiplinlerin farklı anlayışlarını harmanlayarak toplumsal bellek çalışmalarında disiplinler arası bir yaklaşımı teşvik etmeyi ve toplumsal belleğin daha iyi anlaşılmasına katkıda bulunacak yeni araştırma sorularına yön vermeyi ümit etmektedir. Collective memory has been studied extensively in various disciplines of the social sciences, such as sociology, history, anthropology, and political science, resulting in various definitions for the term. Although there is not a well-accepted conceptualization for collective memory across disciplines, the common ground that binds all uses of the term is that collective memory is a form of memory shared by a group, reshaped by social artifacts, and that has an important role in the social identity of the group's members. Memory processes have been of central interest to psychologists. However, systematic investigation of the issues in collective memory from a psychological perspective has just begun. The review aims to apply the findings obtained from experimental studies in cognitive psychology to the issues in collective memory. This review focuses on the experimental studies on the role of social interaction in the reconstruction of memories and convergence among individuals on a shared representation of the past. The studies in experimental settings have generated simplified simulations of real life and suggest that social contagion of memory, collaborative recall, selective retrieval, and retrieval-induced forgetting in social contexts may represent cognitive mechanisms underlying the formation and retrieval of collective memories. After exploring these studies, the review focuses on the parallels between the experimental and exploratory studies on collective memory. Finally, the conclusion proposes that studies in the lab setting can contribute to understanding cognitive mechanisms underlying collective memories in real life, providing general principles to predict collective memories' formation and maintenance. Although this review adopts a cognitive psychological perspective, it attempts to blend insights from various approaches, to encourage an interdisciplinary approach to studying collective memory and devise new research questions to improve the understanding of collective memory.

We apply a cultural psychology approach to collective memory of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In particular, we considered whether practices associated with commemoration of the 9/11 terrorist attacks would promote vigilance (prospective affordance hypothesis) and misattribution of responsibility for the original 9/11 attacks (reconstructive memory hypothesis) in an ostensibly unrelated context of intergroup conflict during September 2015. In Study 1, vigilance toward Iran and misattribution of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks to Iranian sources was greater among participants whom we asked about engagement with 9/11 commemoration than among participants whom we asked about engagement with Labor Day observations. Results of Study 2 suggested that patterns of greater vigilance and misattribution as a function of instructions to recall engagement with 9/11 commemoration were more specifically true only of participants who reported actual engagement with hegemonic commemoration practices. From a cultural psychological perspective, 9/11 commemoration is a case of collective memory not merely because it implicates collective-level (versus personal) identities, but instead because it emphasizes mediation of motivation and action via engagement with commemoration practices and other cultural tools.

A central hypothesis of recovered memory is that the source of the memory may be misattributed, and the memory of an imagined event may be mistaken as the memory of the perceived event that was not remembered. The judgment of memory source depends upon phenomenological characteristics. Thus, the present study investigated characteristics of recovered memory. To exclude potential confounding effects of traumatic stress and acute mental illness, data on recovered memories of diverse valences in a nonclinical sample were collected. Self-report scales including a measure of memory characteristics were used to evaluate recovered memories and age-matched autobiographical memories that had been continuously remembered. The results showed that recovered memory was of lower clarity and contained less detailed sensory, contextual, and temporal information; additionally, it was associated with fewer thoughts and lower intensity of feelings. Participants also felt less confident regarding the veracity of recovered memory in comparison with continuous memory. In contrast to recovered trauma memory reported by clinical clients, vivid sensory details and intense affect did not characterize recovered memory in nonclinical individuals. The reduction in perceptual and contextual information, as well as cognitive operations, may increase the difficulty of judging the source of recovered memory.

Building on Dor’s theory of language as a social technology for the instruction of imagination, I suggest that autobiographical memory evolved culturally as a response to the problems of false memory and deliberate deceit that were introduced by that technology. I propose that sapiens’ linguistic communication about past and future events initially occurred in small groups, and this helped to correct individual memory defects. However, when human groups grew in size and became more socially differentiated, and movement between groups prevented story-verification, misattributions of events became more common. In such conditions individuals with better autobiographical memory had an advantage because they could evaluate their own contents and sources of information, as well as that of others, more accurately; this not only benefitted them directly, but also improved their reliability as social partners. Autobiographical memory thus evolved in the context of human linguistic communication through selection for communicative reliability. However, the advantages of imagination, which enables forward-planning and decision-Making, meant that memory distortions, although controlled and moderated by autobiographical memory, could not be totally eradicated. This may have driven the evolution of additional forms of memory control involving social and linguistic norms. I interpret the language and the social norms of the Piraha as the outcome of the cultural-evolutionary control of memory distortions. Some ways of testing aspects of this proposal are outlined.

Rational analyses of memory suggest that retrievability of past experience depends on its usefulness for predicting the future: memory is adapted to the temporal structure of the environment. Recent research has enriched this view by applying it to semantic memory and reinforcement learning. This paper describes how multiple forms of memory can be linked via common predictive principles, possibly subserved by a shared neural substrate in the hippocampus. Predictive principles offer an explanation for a wide range of behavioral and neural phenomena, including semantic fluency, temporal contiguity effects in episodic memory, and the topological properties of hippocampal place cells.

Episodic memory is the process by which information about experienced events is encoded and retrieved. Successful retrieval of episodic memories is dependent on the way in which memory is tested and as a result many effects and theories of episodic memory are task dependent. One such finding is the list strength effect. In free recall, a positive list strength effect is observed; memory for a given item is harmed by the presence of other strongly encoded items and helped by the presence of other weakly encoded items. In recognition, a null list strength is observed; memory for a given item is unaffected by the strength of other items. Such differential empirical findings are crucial to understanding memory, but it is undesirable to have multiple task-specific theories rather than a unified theory of memory. Here we use cued recall, a task that shares properties of both free recall and recognition, to move toward that goal. In a series of 5 experiments, we observed a null list strength effect in cued recall. We suggest that a successful theory would entail the use of both item and context information during retrieval, consistent with the approach of the Search of Associative Memory model.

Recent work has revealed links between memory, imagination, and problem solving, and suggests that increasing access to detailed memories can lead to improved imagination and problem-solving performance. Depression is often associated with overgeneral memory and imagination, along with problem-solving deficits. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that an interview designed to elicit detailed recollections would enhance imagination and problem solving among both depressed and nondepressed participants. In a within-subjects design, participants completed a control interview or an episodic specificity induction prior to completing memory, imagination, and problem-solving tasks. Results revealed that compared to the control interview, the episodic specificity induction fostered increased detail generation in memory and imagination and more relevant steps on the problem-solving task among depressed and nondepressed participants. This study builds on previous work by demonstrating that a brief interview can enhance problem solving among individuals with depression and supports the notion that episodic memory plays a key role in problem solving. It should be noted, however, that the results of the interview are relatively short-lived.

A large body of evidence supports the existence of a robust handedness difference in episodic memory retrieval, with inconsistent-handedness being associated with superior memory across a wide variety of paradigms, including superior retrieval of lab-based and real world memories. Despite superior episidoc memory in inconsistent-handers, and despite neuroanatomical and neurophysiological differences in cortical regions between inconsistent- and consistent-handers, we are aware of no studies to date that have examined physiological activity in the brains of inconsistent- versus consistent-handers while engaged in memory tasks. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to present a first look at this issue, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) as a simple, non-invasive measure of frontal lobe activity during encoding and recall of list words in inconsistent- and consistent-handers. Behaviourally, we replicated prior studies, finding a significant inconsistent-handed advantage in free recall. Using fNIRS-derived oxygenated haemoglobin (O

This study was designed to investigate the effect of bilingualism and reading difficulties (RD) on episodic and semantic memory. The subjects included 190 children (aged 9–12 years): 45 Iranian-Swedish bilinguals and 59 Swedish monolinguals with typically developed reading, along with 41 bilinguals and 45 monolinguals with RD. To measure episodic memory, subject-performed and verbal tasks were used for encoding, and both free and cued recall were used for retrieval. Letter and category fluency tasks were used to test semantic memory. In action memory, bilingual children with RD benefited less from enactment encoding form compared to children with typically developed reading. Additionally, bilingual with RD had lower rates of recollection in category fluency compared to their monolingual counterparts. However, in letter fluency, there was not found a difference between performances of bilinguals and monolinguals with RD. We discuss the involvement of long-term memory in both bilingualism and reading.

Gender differences in autobiographical memory have been widely reported; in this study, those differences were considered with regard to episodic and semantic memory, and encoding and retrieval. Participants reported memory narratives of two events that had occurred within a day of the report. They were re-tested on them 10–13 weeks later. Narratives were content coded for internal and external details, a method meant to reflect episodic and semantic memory, respectively. Results indicate gender differences in internal details at Time 1 that remained stable at Time 2, suggesting that encoding is the more promising approach to understanding gender differences in this domain and showing consistency with previous research and theory. Gender differences in external details were minimal, but implicated encoding when present.

Preservationism is a dominant account of the justification of beliefs formed on the basis of memory. According to preservationism, a memory belief is justified only if that belief was justified when it was initially held. However, we now know that much (if not most) of what we remember is not explicitly stored, but instead reconstructed when we attempt to recall it. Since reconstructive memory beliefs may not have been continuously held by the agent, or never held before at all, a purely preservationist account of memory does not allow for justified reconstructed memory beliefs. In this essay, I show how a process reliabilist account can maintain preservationism about reproductive memory beliefs while accommodating the justification of reconstructive memory beliefs. I argue that reconstructive memory is an inferential process, and that therefore the beliefs it produces are justified in the same way that other inferential beliefs are justified. Accordingly, my process reliabilist account combines a preservationist account of reproductive memory with an inferential account of reconstructive memory. I end by defending this view against objections.

Confabulation is a symptom central to many psychiatric diagnoses and can be severely debilitating to those who exhibit the symptom. Theorists, scientists, and clinicians have an understandable interest in the nature of confabulation—pursuing ways to define, identify, treat, and perhaps even prevent this memory disorder. Appeals to confabulation as a clinical symptom rely on an account of memory’s function from which cases like the above can be contrasted. Accounting for confabulation is thus an important desideratum for any candidate theory of memory. Many contemporary memory theorists now endorse Constructivism, where memory is understood as a capacity for constructing plausible representations of past events (e.g., De Brigard in Synthese 191:155–185, 2014; Michaelian in Philos Psychol 24:323–342, 2012, 2016). Constructivism’s aim is to account for and normalize the prevalence of memory errors in everyday life. Errors are plausible constructions that, on a particular occasion have led to error. They are not, however, evidence of malfunction in the memory system. While Constructivism offers an uplifting repackaging of the memory errors to which we are all susceptible, it has troubling implications for appeals to confabulation in psychiatric diagnosis. By accommodating memory errors within our understanding of memory’s function, Constructivism runs the risk of being unable to explain how confabulation errors are evidence of malfunction. After reviewing the literature on confabulation and Constructivism, respectively, I identify the tension between them and explore how different versions of Constructivism may respond. The paper concludes with a proposal for distinguishing between kinds of false memory—specifically, between misremembering and confabulation—that may provide a route to their reconciliation.

Whether intentional suppression of an unpleasant or unwanted memory reduces the ability to recall that memory subsequently is a contested issue in contemporary memory research. Building on findings that similar processes are recruited when individuals remember the past and imagine the future, we measured the effects of thought suppression on memory for imagined future scenarios. Thought suppression reduced the ability to recall emotionally negative scenarios, but not those that were emotionally positive. This finding suggests that intentionally avoiding thoughts about emotionally negative episodes may inhibit representations of those memories, progressively reducing their availability to recall.

Objective It is unclear whether observed memory impairment in anorexia nervosa (AN) depends on the semantic structure (categorized words) of material to be encoded. We aimed to investigate the processing of semantically related information in AN. Method Memory performance was assessed in a recall, learning, and recognition test in 27 adult women with AN (19 restricting, 8 binge-eating/purging subtype; average disease duration: 9.32 years) and 30 healthy controls using an extended version of the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, applying semantically related and unrelated word stimuli. Results Short-term memory (immediate recall, learning), regardless of semantics of the words, was significantly worse in AN patients, whereas long-term memory (delayed recall, recognition) did not differ between AN patients and controls. Discussion Semantics of stimuli do not have a better effect on memory recall in AN compared to CO. Impaired short-term versus long-term memory is discussed in relation to dysfunctional working memory in AN. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.

Does explicit recall help or hurt memory-based comparisons? It is often assumed that attempting to recall information from memory should facilitate—or at least not disrupt—memory-based comparisons. Using the domain of price comparisons, the authors demonstrate that memory-based price comparisons are less accurate when consumers first attempt to recall the past price versus when they do not try to do so. Attempting—and failing at—explicit price recall focuses attention on metacognitive experience, resulting in a feeling-of-not-knowing, which then blocks the implicit memory that people could otherwise use to make accurate price comparisons. Drawing attention to this metacognitive feeling-of-not-knowing increases the blocking effect of recall on implicit memory, whereas drawing attention away from the feeling reduces the blocking effect. The results identify a new type of memory blocking—metacognitive memory blocking—in which the feeling-of-not-knowing blocks implicit memory during judgments. They also provide further evidence of dual representations of price memory and demonstrate that most memory-based price comparisons are based on implicit memory and do not entail explicit recall of the reference price.

Copyright © 2019 Böhm, Pfister, Salway and Fløttum. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. We examine how people remember stories about climate change and how they communicate these stories to others. Drawing on theories of reconstructive memory and cultural theory, we assume that recollection is systematically affected by an individual’s world view as well as by the world view of the target audience. In an experimental study with a Norwegian representative sample (N = 266), participants read a story about three politicians, in which each protagonist was described as holding a specific world view and as trying to tackle climate change with a corresponding strategy (individualistic/free market oriented, hierarchical/technology-oriented, or egalitarian/sustainability-oriented). After 1 day and then after 1 week, participants were asked to retell the story as if to somebody who was characterized as being either an individualist, a hierarchist, or an egalitarian; in addition, a neutral recall control condition without a specified audience was included. Participants’ own world view was assessed and they were classified as endorsing individualism, or hierarchism, or egalitarianism. We hypothesized that retellings would be selectively reconstructed according to the world view of the participant, as well as tuned to the audience’s world view. We assessed the cognitive structure of the recollected story, and, using methods from computational text analysis, we computed similarities among retellings and the original narrative, and among retellings and world views. Results suggest that (i) retellings become less accurate over time, (ii) retelling to an audience with an explicit world view leads to more strongly filtered retellings than recalling without a specified audience, but the filter operates in a non-specific manner with respect to world views, (iii) the cognitive structure of the recollected story shows small but systematic differences concerning the link between story problem and solution as a function of the participant’s and the audience’s world view. No interaction was found between the world view of the participant and that of the audience. Results emphasize the role of world views in communicating climate change, and might help to better understand phenomena such as polarization and echo chamber effects.

Theories of reconstructive memory have long been influenced by investigations of false recognition errors, in which old/new judgements are compromised by spontaneous activation of associated but nonpresented concepts. Recent evidence similarly suggests that reconstructive memory processes (so-called memory integration) also support positive learning behaviors, such as inferential reasoning. Despite prevailing hypotheses, the question of whether a common integration process underlies these seemingly disparate mnemonic outcomes is not well understood. To address this question, young adults, recruited from two institutions, completed the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (Deese, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 17–22, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(4), 803–814, 1995) and Bransford and Franks (Cognitive Psychology, 2, 331–350, 1971) false recognition paradigms, as well as an inferential paradigm (Varga & Bauer, Memory & Cognition, 45, 1014–1027, 2017b), all of which depend on integration of related information in memory. Across two experiments, the well-established tasks were adapted such that successful memory integration resulted in the same negative outcome (i.e., false recognition; Experiment 1) or positive outcome (i.e., inferential reasoning; Experiment 2). By capturing variability in item-to-item responding within and among tasks for each person, a common memory integration process was found to elicit positive and negative consequences in paradigms that required the combination of individual units to construct a composite understanding, but only when memory for directly learned and novel, integrated items were modeled together. Furthermore, linking task-related behavior to academic performance revealed that a greater propensity to integrate factual information (but not arbitrary materials) was related to higher SAT scores. Together, these results provide evidence for domain-general and domain-specific reconstructive mechanisms and their role in supporting educational success beyond the laboratory.

Metacognition is a critical factor that appears to be involved in improving episodic memory during childhood. However, as metacognitive abilities emerge relatively late in development, they have not been expected to influence children's memory performance before age 7. Nevertheless, in recent studies, as early as age 3, children rely on basic metacognitive abilities to evaluate their memory and use the result of this evaluation to regulate their memory performance. In this article, we consider evidence for the early development of metacognitive skills. We then review studies indicating that children can use inference rules based on the results of their introspection (monitoring) to regulate their memory decisions, demonstrating the early use of several metacognitive heuristics. Finally, we discuss preliminary findings indicating that changes in how children use metacognitive heuristics can account for changes in episodic memory throughout childhood.

Self-generation of information during memory encoding has large positive effects on subsequent memory for items, but mixed effects on memory for contextual information associated with items. A processing account of generation effects on context memory (Mulligan in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30(4), 838-855, 2004; Mulligan, Lozito, & Rosner in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(4), 836-846, 2006) proposes that these effects depend on whether the generation task causes any shift in processing of the type of context features for which memory is being tested. Mulligan and colleagues have used this account to predict various negative effects of generation on context memory, but the account also predicts positive generation effects under certain circumstances. The present experiment provided a critical test of the processing account by examining how generation affected memory for auditory rather than visual context. Based on the processing account, we predicted that generation of rhyme words should enhance processing of auditory information associated with the words (i.e., voice gender), whereas generation of antonym words should have no effect. These predictions were confirmed, providing support to the processing account.

Morris Moscovitch has emphasized the importance of sensitively and carefully measuring cognition in the real world. With this lesson in mind, we examined the real-world episodic memory problems of older adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). MCI patients often complain of episodic memory problems and perform poorly on standardized neuropsychological measures, but we still do not know enough about their actual difficulties remembering real experiences. A few days after their visit to the laboratory for an experimental session, we telephoned 19 MCI patients and 34 healthy participants without warning to ask what they could recollect about 16 elements of their visit. The patients had difficulty remembering the details of their visit, and reported lower ratings of memory vividness compared to healthy participants. Patients' memory for the visit was commensurate with their performance on three standard clinical memory assessment measures (delayed 5 word recall from the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, long delay free recall from the California Verbal Learning Test-II and recall of the details of the Wechsler Memory Scale-III Logical Memory stories), providing evidence for the generalizability of the clinical measures. Putting these findings together with those from Moscovitch and colleagues (Murphy et al., 2008) can help us better understand the real-world memory implications of Mild Cognitive Impairment.

The late posterior negativity (LPN) is an ERP effect frequently reported in episodic memory tasks. In 2003, we proposed that both non-mnemonic action monitoring processes and reconstructive mnemonic processes contribute to the LPN. Here, we review more recent studies and provide additional evidence that the LPN reflects dissociable (though not mutually exclusive) mnemonic and non-mnemonic processes. The idea that the LPN is related to the modality-specific reactivation of brain regions activated during encoding is critically evaluated. We suggest that the LPN is modulated by the amount of information actually used to reconstruct prior episodes and in parts mediated by source specifying factors, like the amount and overlap of memory bound attributes. We propose that the LPN reflects domain general mechanisms recruited not just during episodic but also during semantic memory tasks, in particular in situations that require highly specific reconstructive processing or continued evaluation of retrieval outcomes. Finally, we relate these ideas to recent accounts of the role of the parietal cortex in allocating attention for the inspection of memory contents.

With advancing age, episodic memory performance shows marked declines along with concurrent reports of lower subjective memory beliefs. Given that normative age-related declines in episodic memory co-occur with declines in other cognitive domains, we examined the relationship between memory beliefs and multiple domains of cognitive functioning. Confirmatory bi-factor structural equation models were used to parse the shared and independent variance among factors representing episodic memory, psychomotor speed, and executive reasoning in one large cohort study (Senior Odyssey, N = 462), and replicated using another large cohort of healthy older adults (ACTIVE, N = 2,802). Accounting for a general fluid cognitive functioning factor (comprised of the shared variance among measures of episodic memory, speed, and reasoning) attenuated the relationship between objective memory performance and subjective memory beliefs in both samples. Moreover, the general cognitive functioning factor was the strongest predictor of memory beliefs in both samples. These findings are consistent with the notion that dispositional memory beliefs may reflect perceptions of cognition more broadly. This may be one reason why memory beliefs have broad predictive validity for interventions that target fluid cognitive ability.

The relationship between dissociable components of autobiographical memory (e.g. semantic personality traits and episodic memory retrieval) and other cognitive skills that are proposed to enable one to develop a sense of self (e.g. introspection) have not previously been explored for children with autism spectrum disorder. This study compared autobiographical memory (semantic and episodic) and knowledge of self (internal/external self-knowledge and introspection/mentalising abilities) in children (aged 11–18 years) with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and typically developing controls (total N = 48). Novel and standard tasks were employed. Compared to typically developing controls, young people with autism spectrum disorder had autobiographical memory difficulties that were characterised by a reduction in the retrieval of semantic personality traits, with more initial prompts required to facilitate episodic memory retrieval and fewer episodic memories containing emotional and sensory information. Knowledge of the self and others was also impaired, with reduced introspection and poorer mentalising abilities. Young people with autism spectrum disorder were also identified as presenting with an atypical relationship between autobiographical memory and self-knowledge, which was significantly different from typically developing controls. Test performance is discussed in relation to the functions of autobiographical memory, with consideration of how these cognitive difficulties may contribute to clinical practices and the social and behavioural characteristics of autism spectrum disorder.

The role of familiarity in associative recognition has been investigated in a number of studies, which have indicated that familiarity can facilitate recognition under certain circumstances. The ability of a pre-experimentally existing common representation to boost the contribution of familiarity has rarely been investigated. In addition, although many studies have investigated the interactions between semantic memory and episodic retrieval, the conditions that influence the presence of specific patterns were unclear. This study aimed to address these two questions. We manipulated the degree of overlap between the two representations using synonym and nonsynonym pairs in an associative recognition task. Results indicated that an increased degree of overlap enhanced recognition performance. The analysis of event-related potentials effects in the test phase showed that synonym pairs elicited both types of old/rearranged effects, whereas nonsynonym pairs elicited a late old/rearranged effect. These results confirmed that a common representation, irrespective of source, was necessary for assuring the presence of familiarity, but a common representation could not distinguish associative recognition depending on familiarity alone. Moreover, our expected double dissociation between familiarity and recollection was absent, which indicated that mode selection may be influenced by the degree of distinctness between old and rearranged pairs rather than the degree of overlap between representations.

Prospection (mental representation of the future) is an aspect of imagination that has recently become a focus of attention for researchers on memory. Evidence from a variety of sources points to episodic memory and future-thinking as being very closely linked and both are connected to well-being and mental health. This article provides an overview of some key findings linking episodic memory, future-thinking and well-being. Similarities and differences between episodic memories for the past and thoughts about the future are reviewed. It is suggested that the uncertainty inherent in future-thinking implies a greater role for semantic memory in how people think about the future compared to how they remember the past. Understanding how semantic and episodic knowledge combine to create representations about the future has the potential to help elucidate ways in which people experiencing psychological distress think about the future.

There is some debate as to whether responding to objects in our environment improves episodic memory or does not impact it. Some authors claim that actively encoding objects improves their representation in episodic memory. Conversely, episodic memory has also been shown to improve in passive conditions, suggesting that the action itself could interfere with the encoding process. This study looks at the impact of attention and action on episodic memory using a novel what-where-when (WWW) task that includes information about object identity (what) and spatial (where) and temporal (when) properties. With this approach, we studied the episodic memory of 2 types of objects: a target, where attention or an action is defined, and a distractor, an object to be ignored, following 2 selective states: active versus passive selection. When targets were actively selected, we found no evidence of episodic memory enhancement compared to passive selection; instead, memory from irrelevant sources was suppressed. The pattern was replicated across a 2-D static display and a more realistic 3-D virtual environment. This selective attention effect on episodic memory was not observed on nonepisodic measures, demonstrating a link between attention and the encoding of episodic experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record