Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: María Carla Navas | Email: mcarla.n94@gmail.com
María Carla Navas 1°2°, Constanza Ferrer 1°2° , María Eugenia Pedreira 1°2° Rodrigo Fernandez 1°2°, Luz Bavassi 1°2°
1° Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias (IFIBYNE)- CONICET, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
2° Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Autobiographical memory (AM) refers to an individuals personal experience, therefore, the way we recall this type of memories is susceptible to changes over time. It has been well documented that, over time, people tend to remember things with more general (semantic) details than vivid or subjective (episodic) details. To study the differences between recent and remote AMs recollection, we have developed an experimental design that aims to minimize laboratory intervention in the recall process. This allows recollection to be as free from the context of the experiment as possible, making it a more ecological approach to AM studies. In our protocol, people were requested to bring to mind specific personal events which were more likely to be recent or remote, and once in mind, to silently elaborate them during a period of time. We implemented different behavioral measures, such as the amount of time a person needs to recall a specific memory (access time), the emotionality and importance of the recalled event as well as the degree of details the individual remembers, along with electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings during the task and several psychological tests. As a control task, participants had to guess animal riddles and mentally elaborate the features and context of these animals. Our general hypothesis is that the age of the autobiographical memory (AM) and the degree of subjective measures have a direct effect on both the access time and the neural markers involved.