The episodicity of verbal reports of personally significant autobiographical memories: vividness correlates with narrative text quality more than with detailedness or memory specificity (original) (raw)

2013, Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience

How can we tell from a memory report whether a memory is episodic or not? Vividness is required by many definitions, whereas detailedness, memory specificity, and narrative text type are competing definitions of episodicity used in research. We explored their correlations with vividness in personally significant autobiographical memories to provide evidence to support their relative claim to define episodic memories. In addition, we explored differences between different memory types and text types as well as between memories with different valences. We asked a lifespan sample (N = 168) of 8-, 12-, 16-, 20-, 40-, and 65-year-olds of both genders (N = 27, 29, 27, 27, 28, 30) to provide brief oral life narratives. These were segmented into thematic memory units. Detailedness of person, place, and time did not correlate with each other or either vividness, memory specificity, or narrative text type. Narrative text type, in contrast, correlated both with vividness and memory specificity...