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Episodic memory, the ability to store and retrieve information from our past, is at the very heart of human experience, underpinning our identity and relationship with the world. Episodic memory is not a unitary phenomenon: in dual-process theory, researchers draw a distinction between familiarity, a rapid and automatic sense of oldness to a previously encountered stimulus ("I know that face"), and recollection, the reactivation of additional context from a particular episode ("We met at the York conference"). A fundamental objective in the study of human memory is to ground recollection and familiarity in neural terms. This requires accurately measuring the contribution of each from behavioural data, which in turn relies on an accurate characterisation of recollection. This thesis introduces a novel source retrieval task to demonstrate that recollection has two critical, and fiercely contested, properties: it is thresholded, i.e. it can fail completely, and successful recollection is graded, i.e. it varies in strength. The consequences of this characterisation are explored. Firstly, familiarity and recollection are functionally separable retrieval mechanisms. Secondly, the models currently used to measure the contribution of each are generally flawed, and a corrected model is described which better fits, and explains, the extant data. Finally, the frequency of recollection is shown to be dissociable from its strength, a result which links behavioural data more strongly than before to a neurocomputational account of episodic memory, and which suggests a relationship between the representational overlap of memory traces and their retrieval. This thesis necessitates a change in the way behavioural memory data is modelled, and consequently the interpretation of evidence underpinning neuroanatomical accounts of memory experience. Significantly, however, it also moves the field beyond a long-running debate and provides a deeper dual-process framework with which to address outstanding questions about the relationship between, and neural basis of, episodic memory processes.

University of Technology, Sydney. / This thesis focuses on individual memory and personally held objects as an essential source of orientation and coherence in history. The primary theoretical aim of this thesis is to interrogate the contention that conventional public forms of history do not always reflect how individuals negotiate with the past publicly or privately. Through the use of oral testimony to explore the memories attached to the material culture people keep I will consider why particular objects become sites of memory for individuals, how their significance changes as succeeding generations inscribe them with new meanings and speculate on the ways in which the materiality of the objects can contribute to how different generations construct their own sense of the past. Using the interrelationship between the objects and memories which emerge from the interviews I will discuss the establishment of family and cultural traditions, why people invest objects with particular meanings, the role of gender in the keeping of objects and raise issues regarding the place of personal memory and privately held objects in public history and museology.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

University of Technology, Sydney. / This thesis focuses on individual memory and personally held objects as an essential source of orientation and coherence in history. The primary theoretical aim of this thesis is to interrogate the contention that conventional public forms of history do not always reflect how individuals negotiate with the past publicly or privately. Through the use of oral testimony to explore the memories attached to the material culture people keep I will consider why particular objects become sites of memory for individuals, how their significance changes as succeeding generations inscribe them with new meanings and speculate on the ways in which the materiality of the objects can contribute to how different generations construct their own sense of the past. Using the interrelationship between the objects and memories which emerge from the interviews I will discuss the establishment of family and cultural traditions, why people invest objects with particular meanings, the role of gender in the keeping of objects and raise issues regarding the place of personal memory and privately held objects in public history and museology.

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Russell Dancy, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Philosophy. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 16, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Catholic University of America. / Bibliography: p. 54-55.

Early recollections (ERs) have been studied by psychologists since the beginning of the twentieth century. The literature suggests that early recollections are a highly usable means for understanding an individual and interactions between individuals. Alfred Adler and others propose that early memories reflect a person's cognitive map of the world and are in fact a prototype of the individual's fundamental attitudes. The memories indicate then what a person has chosen to remember or construct from the past to support or justify present beliefs and behavior choices. They offer the helping professional useful and easily obtainable clues to personality assessment. The potent potential of this tool may be limited by the fact that it is typically used in an interview setting, and is therefore bound by the constraints of that setting. A self administered form for collecting early recollections could overcome these constraints and save time and money and could thus extend the use and benefits of the tool in counseling, education, and research settings. The plausibility of such a procedure was tested in this study by developing a written instrument, Form E-the fifth in a series tested in pilot studies-which was then tested for equivalence with the product of the traditional, interview-based, oral method of ER data collection. Judges working within an experimental design compared the ERs collected via the two strategies. ERs taken via interview and by the written form, each by two judges, were compared in a blind design by two other judges, oral with oral, written with written, and oral with written. Analyses of the data showed no differences between the ERs gathered by different judges within strategy or between strategies, leading to the conclusion that the written instrument, Form E, is as reliable as the oral format, and, using the oral format ERs as criterion, that Form E produced valid ERs.

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No description available.