Themes, events, and episodes in autobiographical memory.
The process by which experience is divided into events was examined. Experiment 1 involved diarists recording their experiences over a 3-month period. Diary entries were later transcribed onto cards and the diarists arranged their cards so as to define events they had experienced, and in a separate phase arranged their cards so as to describe the themes that reflected their life. Examination of event- and theme-building strategies indicated that boundaries were frequently used, and events and themes were often formed from clusters of experience combined using content association rather than temporal sequence. Experiment 2 involved photographs taken by the participants, employed the same procedures as in Experiment 1, and revealed event- and theme-building strategies similar to those identified in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3 the size of the stimulus set from which events and themes were constructed was manipulated; this did not influence construction strategies. Overall, the experiments show that both autobiographical events and themes frequently consist of episodes taken from more than 1 day.
Department of Psychology, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. c.burt@psyc.canterbury.ac.nz
Christopher D B
CD
Burt
Simon
S
Kemp
Martin A
MA
Conway
D001325:Autobiographies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008568:Memory; D011897:Random Allocation