Autobiographical remembering may undergo significant transformations in the digital age, in which the omnipresence of digital tools has led to an increased density of recorded life episodes. To gain deeper insights into these processes, we conducted an experimental think-aloud study in which participants (N = 41) had to remember an important day…

Arguing that teacher reflection on events as a research method is necessary for naming unrecognized values and moral responsibility that have informed current practice, I apply phenomenological reflection to an event with a child from my own classroom experience, recorded through autoethnographic writing, to show how the significance of this…

Visual system is crucial to autobiographical memory. Research tended to show that blind adults may compensate for the loss of visual information in retrieval of their autobiographical memories. Much less is known about how blind children's autobiographical memory develops in the absence of visual information. Using cue-word methodology, 36 sighted…

Stories are more than they seem. Stories can connect humans with other humans, more-than-human things, animals, places and times. And stories can disrupt dominant ways of knowing and being in the world (Ranco & Haverkamp, 2022). Re-telling stories of connection and disruption in research, this paper shares four short autoethnographic musings,…

This article explores the possibilities that the study of personal memories offers to historians of education. All the arguments revolve around three questions: (1) What is your first memory? From this starting point we explore research dealing with autobiographical memories, both earliest and school memories, as well as future possibilities in…

Research on involuntary autobiographical memories has made significant progress over the past two decades. One question in this area concerns whether involuntary memories are functional, or merely cognitive failures. Survey methods have been used to assess the question of involuntary memory functionality, but with mixed results, with some…

Humans have long used external memory aids to support remembering. However, modern digital technologies could facilitate recording and remembering personal information in an unprecedented manner. The present research sought to understand the potential impact of these technologies on autobiographical memory based on interviews with users of smart…

The present article provides a descriptive review of the studies conducted by eight memory researchers who empirically investigated their own autobiographical memory. They are Francis Galton, Madorah Smith, Marigold Linton, Willem Wagenaar, Steen Larsen, Dorthe Berntsen, Alan Baddeley and Richard White. These authors assessed their ability to…

Earliest autobiographical memories mark a potential beginning of our life story. However, their meaning has hardly been investigated. Against this background, participants (N = 182) were asked to think about two kinds of meaning: the meaning that the remembered event might have had in the moment of experience and the meaning that the memory of the…

In a cross-sectional study, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old-children and adults (N = 144, 86 females, predominantly White U.K. sample of lower-middle to middle-class background) were interviewed about their experiences of involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) and semantic mind-pops that come to mind unintentionally. Although some age differences…

We investigated whether the phenomenological experience of mental time travel is similar when one travels as oneself versus with another possible self. Participants first described and rated their phenomenological experience for an autobiographical memory, a counterfactual event, and a future event (real-self condition). Then, they imagined…

A wealth of research suggests that emotion enhances memory. Yet, this enhancement is not uniform. While some theories posit that emotion enhances memory for sensory/perceptual information, such an enhancement has not been observed in mnemonic detail production. However, a focus on remote events (often more semanticized) may be masking an effect.…

The procedure in this study of autobiographical memory after forty years had three phases: uncued recall of experiences of 1978 to 1980, recall cued by descriptions made in 1979 of selected events, and recall cued by a diary written between 1978 and 1980. The schema theory of autobiographical memory describes memory of individual experiences as…

This longitudinal study examined age- and gender-related differences in autobiographical memory about the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and whether the content of these memories predicted psychological adjustment over time. A sample of 247 students (M[subscript age] = 11.94, range 8-16 years, 51.4% female, 85.4% White) was recruited from public and…

Transition theory posits that autobiographical memories are organized by major life transitions, which is often supported by the Living-in-History effect that occurs when people frequently refer to public events to support their date estimates of personal events. In the present study, 52 Chinese older adults in Hong Kong recalled autobiographical…