Assessing Autobiographical Memory

Abstract

In the last several years, I have summarized a number of research articles on autobiographical memory (AM) and a reminiscing strategy to promote AM. AM is memory of personally relevant events in one’s own past. It entails our memories of the place of the experience (where did the event occur), the when of the experience in terms of both conventional time (e.g., day of the week) and time in one’s own life story (e.g., in what life period the event occurred), and the emotions associated with the experience. AM is composed of two different but related types of memory: semantic memory (SM) and episodic memory (EM). Semantic AM is memory for facts about one’s self; episodic AM is memory for past personally experienced events. Remembering the names of the national parks and their geographical features in the state of Utah involves SM. Remembering what happened on my hikes in two of those parks and my feelings associated with those events involves EM. Children and adults with nearly any type of communication impairment (e.g., developmental language disorder, autism, hearing loss/ deafness, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), or those who have experienced significant traumas are highly likely to exhibit difficulties in AM. Deficits in AM result in difficulties in producing coherent stories about personal experiences, which in turn affects development of a sense of self and executive function skills, particularly the ability to plan for the future. Consequently, the AM abilities of students with communication impairments should be evaluated as part of a comprehensive language evaluation. There are two broad methods for assessing AM in behavioral and neuroimaging research: cuing methods to assess memory access and semistructured interviews to assess memory experience.