Autobiographical memory for repeated events: remembering our vacations

ABSTRACT

We aimed to explore autobiographical memory for repeated events. For that aim, five instances of the same event category (i.e. last, first, random, distinct, and typical vacation) were collected from 57 (32 females) adults (M_age = 21.8; SD_age= 2.0). Participants also provided the vacation scripts they have in mind. The last instances were expected to be highest in script consistency whereas the first instances would be the lowest due to duration between encoding and retrieval in addition to the frequency of potential script updates. We predicted that random instances selected freely by the participants would display high script-consistency due to ease of access. Finally, distinct instances would vary in their script consistency to the extent that they deviate from a script-consistent vacation experience. Overall, results were in line with the predictions. Findings are discussed in the context of the schema pointer plus tag model and the dynamic memory model.

KEYWORDS:

• autobiographical memory
• repeated events
• script
• schema

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank to Ayten Bilgin for the data collection and script coding as a part of her master thesis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.