Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Constanza Mariana Ferrer | email: fm.constanza314@gmail.com
Constanza Ferrer 1°, Rodrigo S. Fernandez 2°, Luz Bavassi 2°
1° Universidad de Buenos aires, Facultad de Ciencias exactas y Naturales, Departamento de Física. Buenos Aires, Argentina
2° Laboratorio de Neurociencias de la memoria, IFIByNE, UBA-Conicet
Autobiographical memories (AMs) represent a set of personal experiences and unique, recurrents, extense events that are integrated into a coherent story. Memories be defined as internal representation encoded in brain circuits drawn from experience. AMs contain information at different specification levels that results in very complex representations. In this project, we study the autobiographical memory retrieval process, analyzing the responses of different participants connected to a 30-channel electroencephalograph, facing questions that evoke personal neutral (remote and recent) episodes. To characterize memories we consider a set of variables of interest: age of memory (recent or remote), time to access memory retrieval, level of detail, level of importance and level of emotionality of the memory. Although we did not notice a time distinction between recent and remote memories, we found through clustering techniques that memories can be grouped in two clusters based on emotionality and detail level. In addition a strong correlation was observed between importance level and emotionality level with Spearmans correlation coefficients of remotes S_R= 0.74 for remotes memories, and S_r= 0.84 for recent memories.