The Retrial Processes Of Autobiographical Memory Influenced By Odor

Autobiographical memory is the memory about one person's information and experiencing events. Different definitions of autobiographical memory are defined through different aspects. The studies on autobiographical memories are found early in the psychoanalysis theories but not being studied systematically. Since the long-term memory is sorted to episodic memory and semantic memory, scholars interest autobiographical memory as a new study field. Many phenomenons about autobiographical memories are revealed, including infantile amnesia, reminiscence bump, self-reference effect, overgenerability of autobiographical memory. Martin A. Conway and Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce integrated the studies on autobiographical memory; describe a model of autobiographical memory in which memories are transitory mental constructions within a self-memory system (SMS). Within the SMS, control processes modulate access to the knowledge base by successively shaping cues used to activate autobiographical memory knowledge structures and, in this way, form specific memories. Retrieval models are then divided into generative retrieval and direct retrieval. Using double-cueing methodology, odor cueing is found different from other cueing in autobiographical memory. So Conway thought that odor cueing is direct retrieval. This study investigated the influence of odor cueing on the retrievals processes for autobiographical memory. In Experiment 1 forty-eight participants were asked to retrieve autobiographical memories in response to a label cue only, or a label cue with a congruent odor cue, or label cue with an incongruent odor cue. The result showed that in the label cue only condition and the incongruent odor cue condition, the latency with interference task was longer than with no interference task, but not observed in the congruent odor cue condition. In order to verify the results of Experiment 1, in Experiment 2, nineteen participants were investigated with regard to autobiographical memories cued by odors having a high or low rate of identification. The results showed that there's interference effect in either a high or low rate of identification condition. The main conclusions: 1.Proust phenomenon is a"dual-process"; the odor itself and the odor identification promote the autobiographical memory retrieval process together. 2. The direct retrieval of autobiographical memory is determined by the odor but not by the word activated by the process of odor identification.