BPS COGNITIVE SECTION CONFERENCE, 1-3 SEPTEMBER, 2009

SYMPOSIUM TITLE: Involuntary Memories

CONVENOR AND CHAIR: Lia Kvavilashvili

DISCUSSANT: Martin Conway

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PRESENTERS: Dorthe Berntsen (Aarhus University), John Mace (Eastern Illinois University), Lassi Liikanen (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology), Lia Kvavilashvili (University of Hertfordshire).

Involuntary memories can be classed into two categories: Involuntary semantic memories (or mind-pops) and involuntary autobiographical memories. While there is almost no research on involuntary mind-pops, research on involuntary autobiographical memories has been growing steadily over the past decade and has resulted in novel findings that have enriched the study of autobiographical memory. The present symposium brings together these two strands of research and addresses a variety of important theoretical and empirical questions. Dorthe Berntsen examines the structure of autobiographical memory and mechanisms of voluntary and involuntary autobiographical memories. John Mace continues this theme by comparing memory associations (i.e., chaining) in involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories. Lassi Liikanen reports new data on involuntary musical mind-pops and Lia Kvavilashvili reviews existing research on aging and involuntary memories. She puts forward an idea that a tendency to experience fewer involuntary memories in older adults may be beneficial for their psychological well being. Martin Conway will be a discussant.

PAPER 1
Involuntary autobiographical memories: A basic mode of remembering.

Dorthe Berntsen, Aarhus University

Involuntary autobiographical memories are memories of personal experiences that come to mind spontaneously – i.e., with no preceding attempt at retrieval. They were mentioned as a basic mode of remembering by Ebbinghaus (1885) but ignored by modern cognitive psychology. The talk reviews work supporting the view that involuntary memories are a basic mode of remembering that operates on the same episodic memory system as the voluntary (strategic) remembering and thus follows the same rules of encoding and maintenance. I review evidence that involuntary memories are as frequent in everyday life and show the same pattern as voluntary memories with regard to emotional content, reference to current concerns, distribution across the life span and memory enhancement through rehearsal. Due to their associative and unplanned retrieval, involuntary memories differ from voluntary memories by being more specific, less relevant to life story and identity and involving more emotional reaction at the time of recall.

PAPER 2
Involuntary Memory Chaining versus Event Cuing: Which is a better Indicator of Autobiographical Memory Organization?

John H. Mace, Eastern Illinois University

Involuntary autobiographical memories sometimes occur as a series of memories, where the first memory leads to another, and so forth. Known as involuntary memory chains, memories occurring in this fashion typically are related in two ways: (1) general-event associations, where memories come from the same general event (e.g., a night at the opera, a trip to New York City), and (2) conceptual associations, where memories are connected by common content (e.g., the same people, objects, activities, locations, etc). While conceptual associations are the most prevalent type of associations to appear in involuntary memory chains, a laboratory procedure known event cuing (where subjects voluntarily recall a series of related memories) shows general event associations to be more prevalent. This study investigated the possibility that the event cuing procedure produces biases that lead to over estimates of the prevalence of general event associations, making involuntary memory chains a better estimator of autobiographical memory organization.

PAPER 3
Can involuntary musical memories be experimentally studied?

Lassi A. Liikanen 1,2,3 & Rauni Pääkkönen3

1 Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT)
2 Helsinki University of Technology (TKK)
3 University of Helsinki

Objectives: Involuntary music (IM) is one of involuntary semantic memory types.Currently there is no established methodology to experimental study or quantify IM. A pilot study was designed to study whether IM can be investigated in laboratory and how it relates to working memory. Design & Method: We devised an IM priming paradigm and a measurement instrument. We administered two
short-term memory span tasks, and an attentional capacity task to 14 under-graduates. The short-term tasks were preceded by priming and followed by the IM measurement, and finally the attentional task. Results: Subjects repeatedly reported IM using our instrument. We discovered that subjects with poorer attentional capacity reported more IM, but there were no differences during
auditory or visual memory tasks. Conclusions: Present study suggests that IM is a tangible subject for experimental studies. While the methodology requires cultivation, present results imply that attentional capacity maybe an important predictor for IM.

PAPER 4
Do things pop into mind when you are old?: Effects of age on involuntary cognitions

1Lia Kvavilashvili, 2Simone Schlagman, 3James Erskine & 4Matthias Kliegel

1 University of Hertfordshire, UK
2 Inter Science Research, Germany
3 St.George’s, University of London, UK
4 Technical University of Dresden, Germany

Review of empirical evidence shows that older adults report experiencing less number of everyday involuntary cognitions, e.g., daydreaming, task-unrelated thoughts, mind-popping and involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs). We report a study in which a new method was used to elicit and measure IAMs in the laboratory. Results showed that the retrieval of IAMs was mediated by automatic processes as there was no age effect in the number of reported IAMs or retrieval times. However, the end product of the retrieval (i.e., being able to think about the contents of an IAM) appears to require attentional resources, as only 42% of older adults reported IAMs during an undemanding vigilance task (in contrast to 93% of young adults). The idea that increased psychological well-being in old age can be due to decreased involuntary (especially negative) cognitions is examined and it is hypothesised that older adults who do experience such cognitions (due to well preserved processing resources) will show lower levels of well-being than those who do not experience them.