Experimental Study Of Autobiographical Memory And Its Extraction Mechanism

Everybody should have gone through matter, experience and practice, which have past. "What would the world like if human being lost his memory?" Such question is sure not to be an exaggeration, which has been well proved by so many difficulties amnesia patients have already met.As far as memory is concerned, Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve is the first thing comes into people's mind. However, what Ebbinghaus studied is the forgetting curve about meaningless syllables, which is the artificial "dead" memory in order to meet the operating needs of strict experiment. In fact, such man-refined memory does not exist, at least rarely appear, in real life. In short, such kind of study on artificial memory is just method centralism, and it's merely a typical presentation in memory study and far away from people's real life.In the history of memory study, there are actually some researches focusing on memories about human real life. These forerunners include Ribot, Galton, Freud and Bartlett, who are the initial pioneers studying autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is the memory on individual's life event, and the study on it implies that memory research has come into real life and touched the deep of human reality memory, facing the vivid memory in human normal life. With regard to the history of memory study, isolated researches on autobiographical memory have a relative longer history (nearly a hundred year) than systematic researches, which only last a few decades. The study field of autobiographical memory is extremely broad and wide, and it has become research task in many different subareas of psychology. For instance, cognitive psychologist is often concerned with processing model of autobiographical memory, and neuropsychologist is interested in the neuro-anatomy and neural mechanism, as well as other aspects of neurobiotogy. In contrast, the developmental psychologist is focused on life span, the origin and development, as well as the childhood amnesia observed in autobiographical memory. And personality and social psychologist pay attention to the role of autobiographical memory in personality forming and social attachment; emotional psychologist, the relationship between emotion and autobiographical memory; cultural psychologist, how culture been represented and projected in individual memory; clinic psychologist, the autobiographical memory depression, mania, anxiety, fear or; organizational behavioristist, the autobiographical memoriesof staff and leader; political psychologist, the autobiographical memories of political leader and great man.The content of this report is mainly based on the theoretical discussion and experimental research on retrieval mechanism of autobiographical memory. In the first part, the dividing types of autobiographical memory have been proposed on the basis of summary about many different definitions of autobiographical memory, and we also give a comment on the studying situations both home and abroad on autobiographical memory, through reviewing the study history of it. In part two, the primary study methods since beginning have also been sorted out, and the method features have been revealed as well as the future direction of development, at the level of methodology. The following part brought to light the traits of autobiographical memory according to the knowledge representation, the relationships between autobiographical memory and self, as well as between autobiographical memory and emotion, life span, physiological basis and retrieval mechanism of autobiographical memory. Experimental research is part five, in which the retrieval traits of autobiographical memory have been revealed using different cues in Experiment One; under different life period in Experiment Two; using two different types of cues, semantic and episodic, in Experiment Three. In Experiment Four, the traits of automatic retrieval and conscious retrieval have been uncovered, using the technique of signal detection. Also the age discrepancy in autobiographical memory has been showed u...