The Research On The Narrative Structure Of Autobiographical Memory Under Different Lifetime Periods

As people begin to pay more attention to memory's function, more and more researchersdive into the investigation of autobiographical memory. Lots of researchers have proved thatevent clusters are narrative-like memory structures that draw together information aboutcausally and thematically related events. Prior research, using a method called event cueing,indicates that clusters play an important role in the organization of autobiographical memoryand suggests that cluster formation is a by-product of the normal processes required to plan,execute, evaluate, and discuss meaningful event sequences. Two new event-cueingexperiments are reported in this article. In the first, participants were cued with personalmemories from the past month, the recent past, or the distant past and were required torespond to each of the cueing events by retrieving a second, related personal event. Cueingand cued events were often drawn from the same cluster. However, cueing events from thedistant past were somewhat less likely to elicit clustermates than cueing events from the pastweek or the recent past. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants responded to cueingevents fastest when they were instructed to retrieve clustermates and slowest when they wererequired not to retrieve clustermates. These findings rule out biased retrieval as an explanationfor the frequent recall of clustermates and suggests that the cluster rates provide aconservative measure of the prevalence of event clusters in autobiographical memory.