The Existences And Features Of Dual Representation System Of Autobiographical Memory

Autobiographical memory is a memory of a personal living event. As a brand-new research focus of memory studies, autobiographical memory has been delved into even since the early times. Brewin, in 1996, discovered two representation memories including Situationally-accessible memories and Verbally-accessible memories based on the observation on the patients of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and proposed the dual representation theory. Conway, in 2000, also put forward the two levels of autobiographical memory preservation including semantic propositional and episodic schematic levels. Currently, the research on dual representation theory mainly centers on the retrieval perspectives, activation features, PTSD patient case studies and the insights of biological adaptations. Though the consensus on the activation features in dual representation memories have been reached in the academic field, yet the existence significance and their interwoven relation of dual representation memories have not been scrutinized so far. This research, by adapting Brown's event cueing task, manipulates the activation systems in the memory tasks by means of activating different representation systems in the cueing tasks, analyzes the features and relation of dual representation systems in the event cueing tasks, and explores the adaptation functions of dual representation of autobiographical memories with different emotions.Experiment one is to manipulate the representation system in the retrieval tasks with instruction and to explore the functions of integrative principles and emotional valances in their respective two systems on the dual representation activations by means of the event cueing task. The results show that different retrieval tasks can activate different representation systems and reveal different event features of the memory events, that competition and cooperation both exist in the situational and verbal systems during the activation of representation systems, and that positive events favor activating the situationally-accessible system due to their adaptation of autobiographical memories and negative events incline to the activating verbally-accessible systems.Experiment two is to explore the existence of reversibility of competition in the two systems during the retrieval process based on the shift of activation levels in experiment one. The results indicate that the change of activated representation systems in the memory tasks can change the memory event features in the cueing tasks, and thus prove that the choice of representation systems is reversible.Experiment three compares the results of the above two experiments and requests the subjects to comment on the similarities of the memory events during the two experiments. The results reveal that there exists a high stability in both verbally-accessible activations and situationally-accessible ones, and that the simultaneous activation of both verbally-accessible and situationally-accessible systems benefits the abundance of cognitive resources and coupling of verbally-accessible representations.The conclusions can be made based on the above three experiments:The dual representation system is the mechanism of autobiographical memory representation. The verbally-accessible representation system and situationally-accessible representation systems represent the experiencing elements and truth elements in the memories respectively.The existence of dual representation system fulfills the Coherence and correspondence between self and emotion in the autobiographical memories. It sustains the realization of basic functions of autobiographical memories by means of pursuing significance and offering data. Due to the functions, positive events activate more of situationally-accessible systems and take more field perspectives, while negative events activate more of verbally-accessible systems and take more observer perspectives.The two representation systems present both competition and cooperation during the task retrievals: by competition, the activation of one representation system will reduce the chance of re-activation of that representation system; by cooperation, the similar strategies of full information are employed in the event curing tasks and the whole event of simultaneous activation of two representation systems under the permission of cognitive resources.