Rewriting the past: some factors affecting the variability of personal memories

✍ Scribed by Stephen J. Anderson; Gillian Cohen; Stephanie Taylor

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 157 KB
• Volume: 14
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/1099-0720(200009)14:5<435::aid-acp662>3.0.co;2-b

✦ Synopsis

Three experiments assessed the variability of autobiographic memories and investigated the eects of age of the person, the age of the memory and memory characteristics. Using dierent paradigms to examine repeated recall of the same memories all three experiments showed that the memories of the older adults were more stable in terms of the content. The memories of the younger group showed greater variability across successive recalls. Experiment 3 also showed that the order in which older people recalled memory details was relatively consistent: younger adults showed greater variability in output order. Variability was also signi®cantly aected by the age of the memory with older memories being less variable. No signi®cant eects of memory characteristics (importance, emotion and frequency of rehearsal) were detected. Several explanations for these ®ndings were considered. It was concluded that the personal memories of older people tend to be reproduced from a ®xed precompiled representation whereas younger people's memories are dynamically reconstructed on each occasion of recall.