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Abstract
Involuntary autobiographical memories are memories of personal experiences that pop into mind without a conscious attempt at their retrieval. This study investigated individual differences in the number of involuntary autobiographical memories, and explored the relationship between the frequency of occurrence in involuntary autobiographical memory and cognitive failures in everyday memory, as indexed by metamemory questionnaires. A total of 24 undergraduate students reported involuntary autobiographical memories in controlled field interviews, and completed the Everyday Memory Questionnaire and the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire. The results showed that, despite controlled conditions, considerable individual differences were observed in the number of involuntary autobiographical memories reported while walking along a prescribed route on the campus, and that reported memories were predominantly serving self function. In addition, the number of involuntary autobiographical memories was positively related to cognitive failures in everyday memory: participants who acknowledged more problems in everyday memory had a higher frequency of involuntary memories. The implications of these results are discussed in terms of the complementary function of involuntary autobiographical memory in everyday life.
This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 25380987. The author would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which enhanced the quality of this manuscript. The author also thanks Enago (www.enago.jp) for the English language review.
This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 25380987. The author would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which enhanced the quality of this manuscript. The author also thanks Enago (www.enago.jp) for the English language review.
Notes
1 Kamiya (Citation2003, Citation2007) calls a social function of involuntary autobiographical memory “others function”. The social function of autobiographical memory has been described as talking of one's personal memories to others. But in the involuntary memory phenomenon remembered memory is not always shared with others. It only confirms the existence of others or one's relationship to others in one's personal past. Therefore in this study we use a term “others function” rather than the term “social function”.
2 Compared to the means and standard deviations of the reported numbers of involuntary memories in previous studies (Finnbogadóttir & Berntsen, Citation2013; Kamiya, Citation2012; Rasmussen & Berntsen, Citation2011), the dispersion of the number of memories in this study is not abnormal. Two participants with 29–30 memories are within two standard deviations. When these two data are excluded, the correlation between the CFQ total score and the number of total involuntary autobiographical memories was significant, r(20) = .45, p = .038, and the correlation between the EMQ and total involuntary autobiographical memories was not significant, r(20) = .16, p = .49.