The semantic content (i.e., meaning of words) is the essence of retrieved autobiographical memories. In comparison to previous research, which has mainly focused on phenomenological experiences and age distribution of memory events, the present study provides a novel view on the retrieval of event information by addressing the semantic representation of memories. In the present study the semantic representation (i.e., word locations represented by vectors in a high dimensional space) of retrieved memory information were investigated, by analyzing the data with an automatic statistical algorithm. The experiment comprised a cued recall task, where participants were presented with unimodal (i.e., one sense modality) or multimodal (i.e., three sense modalities in conjunction) retrieval cues and asked to recall autobiographical memories. The memories were verbally narrated, recorded and transcribed to text. The semantic content of the memory narrations was analyzed with a semantic representation generated by latent semantic analysis (LSA). The results indicated that the semantic representation of visually evoked memories were most similar to the multimodally evoked memories, followed by auditorily and olfactorily evoked memories. By categorizing the semantic content into clusters, the present study also identified unique characteristics in the memory content across modalities.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationships among accepting and reminiscing the past, attachment dimensions, and autobiographical memory. University students (N=182) participated to the study (105 women, 77 men). The relationships among attachment anxiety, avoidance, accepting and reminiscing the past, and autobiographical memory were examined within the context of emotionally charged memories and the phenomenological properties of the recalled autobiographical memories, such as the recollection, coherence, and persistence of the reported memories. Results revealed that attachment anxiety significantly predicted the visceral reactions to emotional memories, the vividness and negative valence of the recalled memories, overall the affective aspects of autobiographical memories. Results also indicated that attachment anxiety was a reliable predictor of accepting the past. The interaction between attachment anxiety and avoidance has also a predictive effect on the specifity of memory (specifity of the memory to the person) and vividness, When the patterns of the interaction effect were examined, it was observed that individuals with high attachment anxiety and avoidance (i.e. fearful attachment) reported high scores in specifity, vividness, and cognitive properties of the recalled memories than individuals with low anxiety and high avoidance (i.e., dismissive attachment), suggesting that dismissing individuals repress their memories and fearful hyperactivate them. Attachment avoidance has a significant predictive effect on recollection. Examination of the effect of the accepting the past on the phenomenological properties of autobiographical memory indicated that accepting the past significantly predicted positive and negative valence, perspective, and visceral reactions. Partially supporting the hypotheses, these results suggested that attachment anxiety, but not avoidance has a consistent effect on the affective aspects of autobiographical memory. Findings were discussed on the basis of the literature on both attachment and autobiographical memory.

The aim of this study was to find if manipulating fluency, that is, the ease of processing, could affect confidence ratings about whether an event occurred in the respondents&rsquo / past. To test the familiarity misattribution hypothesis, which states that familiarity caused by fluent processing can be misattributed to past experience if the source of fluency cannot be identified, two methods were used: a revelation task, which was anagram solving and repetition priming. In the revelation task the familiarity misattribution hypothesis and the activation based hypothesis were tested by presenting one of the words in each one of the Life Event Inventory (LEI) items as an anagram or an unrelated anagram before the LEI, respectively. Higher confidence ratings for LEIs with an anagram compared to LEIs without anagrams would indicate that a revelation effect. A revelation effect was not observed for either condition. Therefore, the previous findings of revelation effect for autobiographical memories (Bernstein et al., 2002) could not be replicated when Turkish counterparts of LEI and anagrams were used. In the repetition priming experiments, the participants&rsquo / awareness of the source of fluency was manipulated by presenting either a subliminal or a supraliminal prime before they responded to a LEI item. The prime was either the same as the verb of the LEI sentence, or a different verb. Participants gave higher confidence ratings if subliminal primes were identical to, rather than different from, the verb of the sentence. If the participants were aware of seeing the primes, this difference disappeared. These results were consistent with the familiarity misattribution hypothesis.

Texte remanié de : Dissertation : Romanistik : philosophische Fakultät der Universität Bonn : 1984. / Bibliogr p. 241-271. Index.

Repetition and the passage of time influence the consolidation of long-term episodic memories. The experiments presented here have explored the influence of repetition on recent and remote autobiographical memories both behaviorally with regard to qualitative and quantitative measures of content, and neuroanatomically, focusing on changes within the hippocampus and adjacent structures. The first experiment tested the prediction made by MTT that hippocampal memory traces expand and strengthen as a function of repeated memory retrievals. An fMRI paradigm was used to compare the effect of memory retrieval versus the mere passage of time on hippocampal activation. Participants retrieved remote autobiographical memories that had been previously retrieved either one month earlier, two days earlier, or multiple times during the preceding month. Behavioral analyses revealed that the number and consistency of memory details retrieved increased with multiple retrievals but not with the passage of time. Hippocampal activation did not change as a function of either multiple retrievals or the passage of time. The second behavioral investigation was a follow-up to the first experiment, examining the retrieval of those same memories one year later in order to determine whether the level of detail remained stable or whether the memories returned to their original state. Participants reported even more details than they had recalled at least one year earlier, including new details. This finding was consistent across both multiple and single retrieval conditions. These findings together with those of the first study suggest that both repetition and the passage of time are important factors that may result in an increase in recall. The third and final experiment explored the behavioral and neural influences of repeated reactivation of both recent and remote autobiographical memories. Participants were interviewed a total of five times throughout one month and retrieved 20 significant life event memories, from either within the past several months or more than five years ago. Additionally, two fMRI scan sessions were collected, which enabled a direct comparison of the same 20 memories before and after a series of repetitions. Activation increased with repetition in several brain regions including bilateral posterior cingulate and precuneus. Behaviorally, repetition resulted in increased accessibility as suggested by decreased reaction times between the initial and final retrieval sessions, and a general maintenance of the level of recall resulted with repetition.

The way we socialize today is radically different from how it was only twenty years ago. Since the arrival of the Internet more and more of what we know about the lives of our friends comes from text-based social networks, or blogs. This means that we all, more or less, have become authors of our own life stories and that the reality we live in have become fictionalized. In this paper I explore what effects this postmodern process of dissolving boundaries has had on the autobiographical genre, where the line between fiction and reality is traditionally stressed. By analysing Carina Rydberg’s (b. 1962) autobiographical novel Djävulsformeln (2000) I reveal how the autobiographical genre has evolved during the postmodernist era and how Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical contract now commonly is replaced by a double contract (Poul Behrendt). This means that the contemporary autobiographical novel claims to be both a true story and made up, or, as Christian Lenemark calls it, true lies. To understand the mixed signals about whether the literary text is fiction or a true story the contemporary reader turns to the media and therefore authors more and more often choose to comment on and explain their works in interviews and articles to regain some control over how the text is perceived, thus overstepping the boundary of fiction. We have, as Lenemark puts it, a medialization of the role of the author. With the distinction between what is a depiction of reality and what is fiction, in a state of dissolution the traditional genre classifications have become dated. My claim is that the boundary between fiction and reality has imploded as an effect of the post- modern process and that readers today, like cultural consumers in general, look for "the real thing" but want a better reality than the one they get in real life. Traditional classifications like "autobiography", "reality" and "fiction" thereby no longer apply to contemporary literature.

Tyrimo tikslas – išanalizavus išeivijos rašytojų atsiminimus pagrįsti teiginį, kad išeivijos memuaristika kito nuo dokumentinių, politinę tematiką perteikiančių ligi subjektyvių, asmenines problemas analizuojančių kūrinių. Darbo objektu pasirinkti išeivijos rašytojų memuarai. Darbe naudojamasi analitiniu, aprašomuoju ir hermeneutiniu metodais. Ieškant tinkamo teorinio pagrindo, buvo pasirinktos prancūzų teoretiko Philippe`o Lejeune`o (1989) autobiografijos teorija ir kultūrologo Vytauto Kavolio (1998) teorinės įžvalgos analizuojant autobiografinius tekstus. Tyrime atsiminimų knygos buvo suskirstytos į memuarus ir žanro transformacijas. Memuarai dalijami į dokumentinius bei literatūrinius. Rašytojų dokumentiniai memuarai ima vyrauti apie 1940 – uosius metus, kai Lietuvą okupuoja sovietai. Šį faktą komentuoja rašytojai-politikai V. Krėvė, L. Dovydėnas, I. Šeinius, iš arti stebėję situaciją. Jų memuarai išsiskiria aktualiomis to laiko temomis – faktų, istorinių įvykių, politinių detalių gausa. Asmens ir laiko santykio problema, istorinių įvykių sukūryje atsidūrusio žmogaus išgyvenimai politiką iš memuarų išstumia apie 1950-1965 metus. Šių atsiminimų tekstas pasižymi meninių priemonių, vaizdingų detalių, beletrizuotų elementų gausa, yra ganėtinai subjektyvus (M. Vaitkus, J. Aistis, St. Yla ir kt.). Tyrime pabrėžiama, kad XX amžiaus pabaigoje (1965 – 2000) subjektyvumas tampa pagrindine memuarus apibūdinančia savybe. Atsiminimų knygose kalbama apie save ir kitą... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The aim of the research is to ground the statement that exile memoirs changed from documentary and political works to subjective ones, analyzing personal problems. The object of the work is the memoirs by exile writers. Analytical, descriptive and hermeneutical methods are used. The theory of autobiography by French theoretician Philippe Lejeune (1989) and the theoretical insights while analyzing autobiographical texts by Vytautas Kavolis (1998) were chosen as the theoretical background. In the research, the memoir books were divided into memoirs and genre transformations. Memoirs are subdivided into documentary and literary. The documentary memoirs start dominating around 1940, when Lithuanian was occupied by soviets. This fact is commented by the writers-politicians V. Krėvė, L. Dovydėnas and I. Šeinius, who closely observed the situation. Their memoirs are distinct because of relevant topics for the time, i.e. the abundance of facts, historical events and political details. Around 1950-1965, politics in the memoirs is changed by the problem of the relationship between the person and time or history. A distinctive feature of these texts is the abundance of tropes, figurative details, fictional elements and they are quite subjective (M. Vaitkus, J. Aistis, St. Yla, etc). The research emphasizes that at the end of the XX century (1965-2000) subjectivity becomes the main feature in order to describe memoirs. In the memory books, the focus is on the person and other people; the... [to full text]

The aim of the research is to ground the statement that exile memoirs changed from documentary and political works to subjective ones, analyzing personal problems. The object of the work is the memoirs by exile writers. Analytical, descriptive and hermeneutical methods are used. The theory of autobiography by French theoretician Philippe Lejeune (1989) and the theoretical insights while analyzing autobiographical texts by Vytautas Kavolis (1998) were chosen as the theoretical background. In the research, the memoir books were divided into memoirs and genre transformations. Memoirs are subdivided into documentary and literary. The documentary memoirs start dominating around 1940, when Lithuanian was occupied by soviets. This fact is commented by the writers-politicians V. Krėvė, L. Dovydėnas and I. Šeinius, who closely observed the situation. Their memoirs are distinct because of relevant topics for the time, i.e. the abundance of facts, historical events and political details. Around 1950-1965, politics in the memoirs is changed by the problem of the relationship between the person and time or history. A distinctive feature of these texts is the abundance of tropes, figurative details, fictional elements and they are quite subjective (M. Vaitkus, J. Aistis, St. Yla, etc). The research emphasizes that at the end of the XX century (1965-2000) subjectivity becomes the main feature in order to describe memoirs. In the memory books, the focus is on the person and other people; the... [to full text] / Tyrimo tikslas – išanalizavus išeivijos rašytojų atsiminimus pagrįsti teiginį, kad išeivijos memuaristika kito nuo dokumentinių, politinę tematiką perteikiančių ligi subjektyvių, asmenines problemas analizuojančių kūrinių. Darbo objektu pasirinkti išeivijos rašytojų memuarai. Darbe naudojamasi analitiniu, aprašomuoju ir hermeneutiniu metodais. Ieškant tinkamo teorinio pagrindo, buvo pasirinktos prancūzų teoretiko Philippe`o Lejeune`o (1989) autobiografijos teorija ir kultūrologo Vytauto Kavolio (1998) teorinės įžvalgos analizuojant autobiografinius tekstus. Tyrime atsiminimų knygos buvo suskirstytos į memuarus ir žanro transformacijas. Memuarai dalijami į dokumentinius bei literatūrinius. Rašytojų dokumentiniai memuarai ima vyrauti apie 1940 – uosius metus, kai Lietuvą okupuoja sovietai. Šį faktą komentuoja rašytojai-politikai V. Krėvė, L. Dovydėnas, I. Šeinius, iš arti stebėję situaciją. Jų memuarai išsiskiria aktualiomis to laiko temomis – faktų, istorinių įvykių, politinių detalių gausa. Asmens ir laiko santykio problema, istorinių įvykių sukūryje atsidūrusio žmogaus išgyvenimai politiką iš memuarų išstumia apie 1950-1965 metus. Šių atsiminimų tekstas pasižymi meninių priemonių, vaizdingų detalių, beletrizuotų elementų gausa, yra ganėtinai subjektyvus (M. Vaitkus, J. Aistis, St. Yla ir kt.). Tyrime pabrėžiama, kad XX amžiaus pabaigoje (1965 – 2000) subjektyvumas tampa pagrindine memuarus apibūdinančia savybe. Atsiminimų knygose kalbama apie save ir kitą... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

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This thesis examines the ways in which Cree women of Waskaganish, James Bay use and understand the concept of tradition in narratives about their lives and changes in their community. The fieldnotes of anthropologist Regina Flannery, completed in the 1930's, serve to orient this research, and provide a starting point for discussion. / As northern communities continue to adapt in the face of social and economic changes, cultural categories such as tradition have concurrently undergone reevaluation. It is argued here that the meanings of tradition have become more complex as Cree women adjust to their changing environment. / It is demonstrated that tradition is used as a narrative tool in descriptions of the past, and a means by which women can discuss change and the future of their community. In addition, tradition currently occupies a significant symbolic space in women's individual cultural identities, and is incorporated in daily life in various ways. Furthermore, tradition has also become an important component of Cree political discourse. Finally, it is apparent that tradition remains a contested category among women themselves, and dissent exists as to the future transmission of traditional practices, language and values. / From this analysis, tradition emerges as a nuanced term that has a number of conceptual modalities. It is suggested that a more comprehensive grasp of complex concepts such as tradition is made possible through the prioritization of personal narratives, and the exploration of the ways in which individuals utilize, comprehend and expand on cultural categories.