EVENT CUEING, EVENT CLUSTERS, AND THE TEMPORAL DISTRIBUTION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORIES

This article provides an overview of a series of event-cueing experime nts conducted to investigate how autobiographical memory is organized at the event level. In these experiments, participants first generate a set of personal events (cueing events) and then respond to each by r etrieving a second event memory (the cued event). Subsequently, relati ons between cued and cueing events are coded, and all events are dated and rated for importance. This approach has produced two general find ings. First, we have found that event memories are often embedded in n arrative-like event clusters. Second, across experiments, we have obse rved large, systematic differences in the temporal distribution of the event pairs. In this article, we review evidence concerning the organ izational importance of event clusters. We then examine the temporal d istributions obtained from three representative experiments and accoun t for the marked differences in these distributions by considering how task demands, memory structures, and response strategies affect retri eval from autobiographical memory. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.