Autobiographical memory

Cognitive psychology

Communication

Social psychology

Archaeology

Social memory

Recall

Cognitive science

Psychology

Quarter (Canadian coin)

Affect (linguistics)

History

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

An experiment examined the idea, derived from the Self Memory System model (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), that autobiographical events are sometimes tagged in memory with labels reflecting the life era in which an event occurred. The presence of such labels should affect the ease of judgments of the order in which life events occurred. Accordingly, 39 participants judged the order of two autobiographical events. Latency data consistently showed that between-era judgments were faster than within-era judgments, when the eras were defined in terms of either: (a) college versus high school, (b) academic quarter within year, or (c) academic year within school. The accuracy data similarly supported the presence of a between-era judgment effect for the college versus high school dichotomy.

Ordering our world: The quest for traces of temporal organization in autobiographical memory