The ability to remember when autobiographical events occurred is at least as crucial to adaptive human functioning as the ability to remember the content of those events. There are few other studies that examine peoples' ability to correctly order, in recollection, the day-to-day events in their past. The proposed studies will provide insight into the mental mechanics of time: How is temporal information coded in memory and how is it later used in the process of reconstructing the temporal qualities of an event? The technique to be used to explore these issues is a serial order judgment task (Judgment-of-Recency, or JOR). On each trial of this task, people will report which of a pair of autobiographical events occurred sooner (or later). Although this task has been used frequently in the study of short-term memory, it has not often been used to study real-world long-term autobiographical memory. We expect a symbolic temporal distance effect and a relation between event age and ordering performance to emerge. It should be easier to judge events that are recent then events that are old, and it should be easier to judge events that are widely separated in time than events that occurred in temporal proximity. Such results would converge nicely with similar outcomes of laboratory studies. However, the use of real-world events allows the exploration of several additional issues. The first concerns the possible independence of event memory and temporal judgment. The second concerns the relation between various rehearsal types and temporal judgment. A third issue concerns the role of life period themes in temporal ordering. This interest is suggested by recent theory suggesting that it should be easier to judge events between themes than events within a theme. It should also be noted that exploration of this question would be difficult using laboratory-derived stimuli; tests of this theory virtually require the use of autobiographical materials. The fourth issue concerns convergent validity. Because of the difficulty in providing """"""""controls"""""""" in real-world memory research, one must take more care to examine results across different methodologies than might be the case in tightly controlled experimental settings. Hence, the studies in the proposed project explore various hypotheses and the relation between variables and serial order judgment performance using two different memory-collection techniques. ? ?
| Ritchie, Timothy; Skowronski, John J; Hartnett, Jessica et al. (2009) The fading affect bias in the context of emotion activation level, mood, and personal theories of emotion change. Memory 17:428-44 |
