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      Modifying the Frequency and Characteristics of Involuntary Autobiographical Memories

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          Abstract

          Recent studies have shown that involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) can be elicited in the laboratory. Here we assessed whether the specific instructions given to participants can change the nature of the IAMs reported, in terms of both their frequency and their characteristics. People were either made or not made aware that the aim of the study was to examine IAMs. They reported mental contents either whenever they became aware of them or following a predetermined schedule. Both making people aware of the aim of the study and following a fixed schedule of interruptions increased significantly the number of IAMs reported. When aware of the aim of the study, participants reported more specific memories that had been retrieved and rehearsed more often in the past. These findings demonstrate that the number and characteristics of memories depend on the procedure used. Explanations of these effects and their implications for research on IAMs are discussed.

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          Meta-awareness, perceptual decoupling and the wandering mind.

          Mind wandering (i.e. engaging in cognitions unrelated to the current demands of the external environment) reflects the cyclic activity of two core processes: the capacity to disengage attention from perception (known as perceptual decoupling) and the ability to take explicit note of the current contents of consciousness (known as meta-awareness). Research on perceptual decoupling demonstrates that mental events that arise without any external precedent (known as stimulus independent thoughts) often interfere with the online processing of sensory information. Findings regarding meta-awareness reveal that the mind is only intermittently aware of engaging in mind wandering. These basic aspects of mind wandering are considered with respect to the activity of the default network, the role of executive processes, the contributions of meta-awareness and the functionality of mind wandering. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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            Emotionally charged autobiographical memories across the life span: the recall of happy, sad, traumatic, and involuntary memories.

            A sample of 1,241 respondents between 20 and 93 years old were asked their age in their happiest, saddest, most traumatic, most important memory, and most recent involuntary memory. For older respondents, there was a clear bump in the 20s for the most important and happiest memories. In contrast, saddest and most traumatic memories showed a monotonically decreasing retention function. Happy involuntary memories were over twice as common as unhappy ones, and only happy involuntary memories showed a bump in the 20s. Life scripts favoring positive events in young adulthood can account for the findings. Standard accounts of the bump need to be modified, for example, by repression or reduced rehearsal of negative events due to life change or social censure.
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              Involuntary (spontaneous) mental time travel into the past and future.

              Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself backward in time to relive past experiences and forward in time to pre-live possible future experiences. Previous work has focused on MTT in its voluntary (controlled) form. Here, we introduce the notion of involuntary (spontaneous) MTT. We examined involuntary versus voluntary and past versus future MTT in a diary study. We found that involuntary future event representations-defined as representations of possible personal future events that come to mind with no preceding search attempts-were as common as involuntary autobiographical memories and similar to them regarding cuing and subjective qualities. Future MTT involved more positive and idyllic representations than past MTT. MTT into the distant future/past involved more representations of cultural life script events than MTT into the immediate past/future. The findings are discussed in relation to cultural learning and MTT considered as a higher mental process.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2014
                9 April 2014
                : 9
                : 4
                : e89582
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of NEUROFARBA-Section of Psychology, University of Florence, Florence, Italy
                [2 ]Department of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom
                Harvard Medical School, United States of America
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: GM IB. Performed the experiments: IB. Analyzed the data: GM MV IB CP. Wrote the paper: GM MV CP.

                Article
                PONE-D-13-41308
                10.1371/journal.pone.0089582
                3981656
                24717536
                f6c9c055-e7c2-4440-ad39-29822a8ebdef
                Copyright @ 2014

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 6 October 2013
                : 21 January 2014
                Page count
                Pages: 7
                Funding
                These authors have no support or funding to report.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Neuroscience
                Cognitive Neuroscience
                Working Memory
                Cognitive Science
                Cognition
                Memory
                Recall (Memory)
                Cognitive Psychology
                Psychology
                Experimental Psychology
                Medicine and Health Sciences
                Physical Sciences
                Mathematics
                Statistics (Mathematics)
                Biostatistics
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Research Design
                Clinical Research Design
                Survey Research
                Social Sciences

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

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