The content and organization of autobiographical memories

As evidenced by many of the chapters in this volume, as well as in Rubin (1987), cognitive psychologists have become increasingly interested in the study of autobiographical memories. But because this development is relatively recent, it understandably exhibits certain gaps and weaknesses. Although numerous experiments have addressed the retention of autobiographical memories, relatively few have addressed the content of autobiographical memories, how they are organized, or how they are related to world knowledge. Although a fair amount of empirical work has addressed autobiographical memories, no major theories have been proposed to account for them or to integrate them with other phenomena such as comprehension, learning, and problem solving. A benefit of the cognitive science atmosphere that has grown with the development of cognitive psychology is that diverse methodological and theoretical frameworks contribute to one another's development. Insights from one approach fill gaps, stimulate new research, and occasionally restructure another approach. This chapter reflects such cross-fertilization. My initial interest in autobiographical memories was stimulated by Janet Kolodner's computational theory of autobiographical memories (Kolodner, 1978, 1980, 1983a,b, 1984; Schank & Kolodner, 1979), and our discussions of this work led to some very preliminary attempts to integrate psychological and computational perspectives (Kolodner & Barsalou, 1982, 1983). In contrast to cognitive psychology, computational work on autobiographical memories has primarily been theoretical and has focused on the content and organization of autobiographical memories, along with their relation to world knowledge.