Priming involuntary autobiographical memories in the lab

ABSTRACT

Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) are recollections of personal past that frequently and spontaneously occur in daily life. Initial studies by Mace (2005) showed that deliberately reminiscing about a certain lifetime period (e.g., high school) significantly increased the number of different IAMs from the same period in subsequent days, suggesting that priming may play a significant role in the retrieval of IAMs in everyday life. In the present study, we used a modified experimental paradigm, originally used by Schlagman and Kvavilashvili (2008), to study IAMs under well-controlled laboratory conditions. Participants completed a monotonous vigilance task twice and reported the occurrence of any spontaneous thoughts that were later classed as IAMs or other thoughts. Priming was manipulated by having experimental participants reminiscing about high school period between the two vigilance tasks and control participants playing simple games. Results showed that participants in the experimental group reported IAMs relating to high school period more frequently during the second vigilance task than those in the control group. In the experimental group, the number of high school memories was marginally higher in the second vigilance task compared to the first vigilance task with the medium effect size, but this within subjects effect was not significant in the control group. Finally, priming also enhanced the retrieval of more remote IAMs in the experimental group compared to the control group. These results suggest that priming may play a significant role in the activation and recall of IAMs and open up interesting avenues for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• involuntary autobiographical memories
• involuntary retrieval
• retrieval intentionality
• priming
• spreading activation

Acknowledgements

We thank Marcin Draszczuk for IT preparation of the IMP. Finally, we also wish to thank Lia Kvavilashvili and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Please note that throughout the paper these phases are also called the first or the second involuntary memory (IAM) collecting phase.

2 Throughout the paper this phase is also called the voluntary memory recording phase.

3 Please note that since most participants in the present study were undergraduate students, the college time and after college time relate either to their present or most recent past, while periods before the high school time relate rather to the remote past.

4 The Polish adaptation of verbal phrases is described in detail elsewhere (Barzykowski et al., 2016, p. 6).

5 Please note that we used the same set of cues during the first and second phase to be sure that the possible differences between the first and second phase were due to the manipulation used rather than to the differences between cues.

6 It measures the strength of negative and positive emotions and consists of 30 items measuring current emotional states. Participants have to rate on a 5-point scale to what extent the given adjectives correspond with their current state. The reliability coefficients (internal consistency and stability) for the questionnaire equalled .73–.95. It was applied in order to control for comparability of studied groups. For example, it is possible that voluntarily reminiscing about high school period may somehow affect participants’ mood.

7 Please note that by employing two practise sessions we were able to sequentially provide participants with crucial elements of the procedure (i.e., vigilance task instruction and involuntary thought recording instruction) followed by a relevant practise session.

8 The voluntary memory recording module in the high school group took, on average, 12.94 minutes (SD = 4.22).

9 Please note that participants knew that they would do the vigilance task twice and, therefore, the repetition of cue-words was something understandable and expected to them. To our best knowledge, participants did not pay any special attention to the repetition of verbal cues and they were not surprised by its occurrence.

10 Please note that in order to examine the effects of priming it was necessitated to include into the mixed ANOVAs reported below only participants that had at least one memory reported in both phase 1 and 2. Therefore the total number of valid participants was 35 (17 in the control group and 18 in the high school condition).

Additional information

Funding

The present study was supported by a grant from the National Science Centre, Poland [no.: 2011/01/N/HS6/02370] for Krystian Barzykowski. The doctoral dissertation, prepared under the supervision of Agnieszka Niedźwieńska, was supported by a doctoral scholarship from the National Science Centre, Poland [no.: 2013/08/T/HS6/00065] for Krystian Barzykowski. The writing of the present paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Centre, Poland [no.: 2015/19/D/HS6/00641] for Krystian Barzykowski.