Individual differences in autobiographical memory: a Danish version of the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART)

Abstract

Individual differences in autobiographical memory have become an area of growing research interest. Recently, the Autobiographical Recollection Test (ART; Berntsen et al., 2019) was introduced. The ART measures individual differences in autobiographical memory along seven components: Vividness, narrative coherence, reliving, rehearsal, scene, visual imagery, and life story relevance. The ART is a useful and easily administered tool, but is so far not available in any of the Nordic languages. The aim of the present study was to provide a Danish translation of the ART and to provide correlations between the Danish ART and characteristics of randomly sampled memories (i.e. memories cued by words) in order to support the validity of the translation. First, the ART was translated into Danish. Then, 122 Danish adults filled out the Danish ART and rated the recollective qualities of three word cued autobiographical memories. The internal consistency was in line with findings on the original English version of the scale as were correlations between the Danish ART, Brief ART and the seven components of the ART. The Danish ART correlated positively with characteristics of the word cued memories corresponding to the seven components of the ART. Additional analyses demonstrated that the magnitude of these correlations were similar to those between ratings of individual memory items, supporting the validity of the ART as a trait-like measure of the recollective experience of autobiographical memory. The ART could be of interest to many areas of psychology and potential applications of the ART are discussed.

Keywords:

• autobiographical memory
• individual differences
• recollective experience
• Autobiographical Recollection Test

Author contributions

D.B. acquired funding. T.B.G. and D.B. designed the study. T.B.G. collected and analyzed the data. T.B.G., N.P.N., and D.B. interpreted the data., T.B.G. wrote the first draft for the manuscript. All authors commented on the manuscript and approved the final version.

Author note

The authors thank Daniel Munkholm Møller for help setting up the online data collection on Prolific, Sigrid Overgaard Andersen for translating the ART to Danish, the group of Danish adults who provided feedback on the first translation of the scale, and Heidi Eskegaard Jensen for the back-translation of the ART. Data and study materials are available upon request from the corresponding author.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 Two participants indicated only having two years of formal education. Most likely, these participants did not provide their total years of formal education, but instead any additional years of education beyond basic education and high school, which is commonly requested in surveys in a Danish context. Hence, years of formal education was corrected to 14 for these two participants (9 years of basic education + 3 years of high school + 2 years of additional education).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Independent Research Fund, Denmark [9037-00015B9]. The funding source had no role in the study design, data collection, analysis or interpretation of the data, writing of the manuscript, or the decision to submit the paper for publication.