THE SPECIFICITY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY AND IMAGEABILITY OF THE FUTURE

Three studies examined whether the specificity with which people retri eve episodes from their past determines the specificity with which the y imagine the future. In the first study, suicidal patients and nondep ressed controls generated autobiographical events and possible future events in response to cues. Suicidal subjects' memory and future respo nses were more generic, and specificity level for the past and the fut ure was significantly correlated for both groups. In the second and th ird studies, the effect of experimental manipulation of retrieval styl e was examined by instructing subjects to retrieve specific events or summaries of events from their past (Experiment 2) or by giving high- or low-imageable words to cue memories (Experiment 3). Results showed that induction of a generic retrieval style reduced the specificity of images of the future. It is suggested that the association between me mory retrieval and future imaging arises because the intermediate desc riptions used in searching autobiographical memory are also used to ge nerate images of possible events in the future.