Toward a Core-Processes Approach to Event Memory

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

It is parsimonious to assume that a core set of processes is involved in encoding, revising, and structuring event memories, and that these processes are used regardless of whether the events in question are experienced directly or vicariously and regardless of whether they refer to actual occurrences, imagined occurrences, or fictional ones. The research projects out lined in this proposal will address this assumption by testing predictions generated from Transition Theory (TT; Brown, 2016; Brown, et at., 2012, 2016) and by using methods developed to investigate autobiographical memory to explore the ways that people access and represent fictional events. The general expectation is that these projects, and others to follow, will contribute to a Core-processes Approach to event memory and that TT will play an important role in the development of this approach. In brief, TT assumes that memory for events mirrors the structure of (lived or conveyed) experience and that event processing engages both basic associative processes and high-level comprehension processes. Because it does not treat the Self as its central construct, TT has the potential of generalizing across a wide range of event memories. The proposal itself outlines two sets of studies. The first is a direct extension of the Living-in-History project (Brown et al., 2009, 2012, 2016) and will assess the mnemonic impact of natural disasters (e.g., the High River Flood, the Fort McMurray and Lesser Slave Lake Fires) within a Canadian context. TT predicts that the effect of a given transition will depend on its long-term impact on an individual's fabric-of-daily life. Thus the same nominal event (i.e., disaster) can and should affect autobiographical memory in very different ways. The second project will use well-established autobiographical memory methods (e.g., event-cueing, retrieval-strategy menus and RTs, event-pair relation-type menus; Brown Uzer & Brown, 2017) to investigate how people organize and retrieve events from the Harry Potter series. Core-processes Approach assumes that event memories, regardless of their ontological status, are processed and represented in much the same way. Thus I expect to find many parallels between autobiographical memory and Pott-ographical memories. The notion that narrative understanding and autobiographical memory share a common set of processes and representations has an obvious intuitive appeal. However, the idea has rarely been explored in a systematic manner and there has not yet been a serious attempt to develop a theory that bridges these potentially related research areas. The research outlined above is intended to address both gaps by demonstrating how similar performance across domains and by furthering our understanding of transitions, particularly collective transitions driven by climate change, and the role they play in autobiographical memory.