Autobiographical Memory: The Identity Of Memory-construction And Self-construction

Autobiographical memory,based on the paradigms of cognitive psychology, is an important field in cognitive science in recent years, and relates to the several paradigms such as self research and personality research. Autobiographical memory rises from the confrontation to memory metaphor---- storehouse, and is established in The natural everyday-memory approach by Bartlett, which initiates the research interesting to the nature of the memory.As an individual's real life memory, the primary character of the autobiographical memory is the construction of memory, which means that the previous experiences work on the new experiences------ what we can retrieve and what we cannot retrieve. In the process of constructing, the important contributor is the self-themes that integrate individual's view about themselves, the world and their emotions and attitudes. autobiographical memories contribute the material to the self. Indeed, autobiographical knowledge might be thought of as a resource of the self.In the orthodox metaphor of storehouse, memory is considered as the information and experience pool. Their study relies on experimental techniques for theory testing and is concerned with the discovery of generalizable principles. On the contrast, natural approach argues that the availability of data that could not be obtained in a laboratory, suggestions for areas that are worthy of controlled study, and potentially, new phenomena.Bartlett clearly proposed that the memory did not simply carry on the reappearance to the past event in 1930s. by the massive experiments, He proved that memory was not the biological trace fluted by outside stimulates and that forgetting is not the trace retrogression. Forgetting is not only the information reduction, but also the increase or the change of information. The memory is individual's interior scheme construction. This construction occurs in whole cognition process----- perception, memory, and recollection. The Bartlett research established the theory tradition.Autobiographical memory has fundamental significance to oneself, emotion and personal academic credentials. On the background of life span, this natural memory shows two special aspects that is the emergence of childhood amnesia and reminiscence bump. Childhood amnesia means that people can not recollect early events that occur in fore 2-3 years old. Reminiscence bump means that people often recollect more events that occur in teenage and early adults.Autobiographical knowledge takes a number of forms, and at least three different types or layers of autobiographical knowledge have been identified so far: lifetime periods, general events, and event-specific knowledge. But those autobiographical knowledge are neither encoded randomly into long-term memory nor represented in a disorganized or unsystematic way. One of the main influences on the encoding and structure of autobiographical knowledge is the self. This constructivist account of autobiographical memory proposes that memories are transitory mental representations constructed by a centrally mediated complex retrieval process and clewed by self.As a part of autobiographical memory, public memory shapes the identity of a generation unit, because the public events that impinge on a generation, shared cultural experiences, shared experience of a type of event----common way of responding to the world and common existential problems, and shared conceptual knowledge, all of which shape and locate particular generation. Autobiographical memory research provides a new angle of view, and opens a field of vision for studying the interaction of memory and personality, as well as the interaction of memory and self.