Dorthe Berntsen, Center on Autobiographical Memory Research, Aarhus University, Denmark

Title: What happened to Ebbinghaus’ second category of memories? Basic findings on involuntary autobiographical memories

Abstract:
Involuntary autobiographical memories are memories of personal events that come to mind spontaneously – that is, with no preceding attempt at retrieval. Such spontaneously arising memories were described by Ebbinghaus (1885) as one of three basic modes of memory, but were long ignored by modern memory research. In clinical psychology, involuntary memories of past events were studied for decades, but with an exclusive focus on intrusive memories for negative, stressful events related to psychological disorders. In this lecture, I will review an upsurge of research on involuntary memories conducted over the last couple of decades using naturalistic, experimental, and brain imaging methodologies and involving a range of different study populations. This research has shown that involuntary memories of past events rather than being rare or focusing on negative events (as was long thought) are highly frequent in daily life, and predominantly deal with emotionally positive and mundane events from the recent past. They share many similarities with intentionally retrieved memories of past events regarding content and qualities, but critical differences regarding mode of activation. They represent a context-sensitive, associative and relatively automatic way of recollecting past events that involves little executive control, and likely is an evolutionary and ontogenetically forerunner of strategic retrieval of past events.


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