Autobiographical Memory in Life-Span Perspective (completed)

Funded by the Köhler Foundation

The autobiographical memory is constitutive of human consciousness. This memory system, which is specific to humans, enables humans to situate their personal existence in a space-time continuum and look back on a past that preceded the present. Obviously, this ability to embark on “mental time travel” (Endel Tulving) is used as a guide for future actions. This allows things we have learned and experienced to be used to form and plan the future.

Autobiographical memories are characterized by the fact that they are self-referential, are temporally indexed and emotionally encoded. The ontogenesis of autobiographical memory lasts until early adulthood, but is still largely unexplored, in particular during childhood and adolescence. In adulthood the autobiographical memory undergoes major changes, before then being subject to limitations and degradation processes in old age. This all has an impact on the level of narrative self-representation, which is the subject addressed over the entire lifespan by this proposed research project.

The project uses autobiographical interviews, conducted as part of three different projects, and which are probably, all together, the most extensive pool of interview material currently available concerning the age range from eight to over seventy years of age. For the evaluation of this material, researchers have developed a paradigm that can be used to study multiple dimensions of autobiographical self-representation (e.g. agenticity, egotism, integration, etc.) comparing different age groups. The project will be the first study on the development of autobiographical memory over the entire lifespan.