1

Autobiographical Memory and

Survey Research

William F. Brewer

In this chapter, I review some of the topics in the study of autobiographical mem-
ory that appear to be the most relevant for the area of survey research: (a) types
of autobiographical memory, (b) types of data used in memory research, (c)
information in personal memory, (d) forgetting in autobiographical memory, (e)
event characteristics related to memory, and (0 the accuracy of autobiographical
memory. For each topic, I first discuss the basic research from the area of auto-
biographical memory and then make a few comments about the relevance of the
research for the area of survey research. My comments about survey research
should be taken with a grain of salt, since I have no expertise in this area.

Types of Autobiographical Memory

Autobiographical Memory
Some years ago John Pani and I (Brewer & Pani, 1983) proposed a structural
account of human memory organized in terms of frequency of exposure, types
of input, and forms of representation. In a more recent paper (Brewer, 1986), I
argued that autobiographical memory is best thought of as the subset of human
memory related to the self, and I proposed a classification scheme for autobio-
graphical memory that is organized in terms of frequency of experience and
imaginal properties of the representation to give four types of autobiographical
memory (see Table 1.1).
My classification scheme was designed to try bringing some order into the
wide variety of types of memory that are called "autobiographical memory"
(e.g., Rubin, 1986). One of the major differences among types of autobiograph-
ical memory seemed to me to depend on the frequency with which something
had been experienced. The other major difference seemed to be related to the
experiential nature of memory representation. Some forms of autobiographical
memory appeared to be expressed in the form of phenomenally experienced
N. Schwarz et al. (eds.), Autobiographical Memory and the Validity of Retrospective Reports
© Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. 1994
12 1. Autobiographical Memory and Survey Research

TABLE 1.1. Forms of Autobiographical Memory

bnaginal Properties

Frequency of Experience Imaginal Nonimaginal

Single instance (episodic) Personal memory Autobiographical

fact
Repeated with variation (generic) Generic personal memory Self-schema

images; other forms appeared to be accompanied by very little experienced im-

agery. In the next section of this chapter, I describe the four forms of autobio-
graphical memory that result from the application of my classification scheme.

Personal Memory
The first type of autobiographical memory to be discussed is personal memory,
the form of memory with imaginal properties that results from experiencing a
single event. This type of memory is a recollection of a particular episode from
an individual's past. For example, I recollect sitting on a couch near a staircase
at Allerton House reviewing my notes for a few minutes before the opening day
of the conference on which this volume is based. This form of memory fre-
quently appears to be a "reliving" of the original phenomenal experience and is
almost always accompanied by reports of visual imagery (cf. Brewer, 1988).
This type of memory is experienced as occurring at a specific time and place.
Note, however, that this does not mean that the individual can assign an absolute
date to the event, just that it is experienced as having occurred at a particular
moment in the individual's life. Another characteristic of this type of memory is
that it is usually accompanied by the belief that it is a veridical record of the
originally experienced episode. Personal memory is very similar to Tulving' s
(1972) original definition of "episodic memory," but it is much narrower in
scope than the way in which the term "episodic memory" has come to be used in
current memory research (see Brewer, 1986, pp. 32-34, for a detailed discus-
sion).

Generic Personal Memory

The next type of autobiographical memory to be discussed is generic personal
memory, the form of memory with imaginal properties that results from experi-
encing a series of similar events. For example, I have a generic personal mem-
ory of going into the basement of Allerton House and purchasing a drink from
the soft drink machine there. I did this several times during the conference and
had done it at earlier conferences that I had attended at Allerton House. I have a
generic visual image of the old soft drink machine against the right-hand wall,
but I do not have a specific personal memory of a particular episode (e.g., I can-
not recall what type of soft drink I purchased or if there was anyone there with
me). Several researchers (Brewer, 1986, p. 45; M. Linton, 1982, p. 79) have
 William F. Brewer 13

proposed that memories of this type are produced by a "dual-process theory of

repetition" (Brewer, 1988, p. 76) in which the repetition of similar events leads
to the development of generic memories at the expense of the individual mem-
ories that were repeated. The next two types of memory to be discussed are the
nonphenomenal forms of autobiographical memory.

Autobiographical Fact
An autobiographical fact is a nonimaginal memory of a single instance of in-
formation relating to the self. For example, I recall the fact that I gave a talk at
another conference in Chicago the day before the Allerton conference. I can
recall this fact independently of any personal memories about either conference.

Self-Schema
The last type of autobiographical memory to be discussed is the nonimage form
of memory that results from experiencing a series of similar events. It is as-
sumed that with repeated exposure to information related to the self, individuals
come to organize the information about themselves (e.g., food preferences,
places lived, etc.) into a self-schema (Epstein, 1973; Markus, 1980) just as they
organize nonself information into schemata (cf. Brewer & Nakamura, 1984;
Rumelhart, 1980). For example, from my experience in writing chapters for
conference volumes over the years, I have come to know that I almost never get
my flCSt draft in by the deadline. This is now part of my self-schema (just ask
any of my conference editors!), and I can recall this information about myself
without having to recall each individual conference volume.

Survey Research
It would appear that respondents answer most of the questions used in survey
research by means of one or more of the forms of autobiographical memory
discussed above. It seems to me that an analysis of which type of memory re-
spondents are using to answer a particular type of question would lead to deeper
understanding of the question-answering process.
In fact, there has recently been some progress along this line in the area of
survey research. It appears that many researchers in this area (e.g., Sudman &
Bradburn, 1974) had been making the implicit assumption that respondents were
using instance memory (the top row of Table 1.1) to answer most survey ques-
tions. There is considerable potential for problems here if the survey respondents
are actually using generic memories when the survey researchers think that the
respondents are using the "recall-and-count" strategy. In fact, Blair and Burton
(1987) have carried out a study of respondents' self-reported memory strategies
that suggests that answers for questions relating to events with frequencies great-
er than 10 are almost always answered through the noninstance forms of auto-
biographical memory (i.e., the bottom row of Table 1.1). This study opens up a
variety of important topics: Are there differences in accuracy for information
14 1. Autobiographical Memory and Survey Research

based on instance memory versus generic memory? (for example, "How many
cups of coffee did you drink yesterday?" vs. "How many cups of coffee do you
drink in an average day?"). What is the relationship between the individual in-
stances and the resulting generic memory structures? The work reported in this
volume by Smith and Jobe (chap. 8), Menon (chap. 10), and Schwarz, Hippler,
and Noelle-Neumann (chap. 12) supply some initial answers to several of these
questions. The Blair and Burton (1987) study and the later work reported in this
volume provide good examples of the possible interactions between the areas of
autobiographical memory and survey research. The theoretical account of the
different forms of memory deriving from an analysis of basic issues in auto-
biographical memory provides support for the distinction that workers in survey
research want to make, and their data provide some new empirical evidence
about factors that lead subjects to use one memory system versus another.

Types of Data Used in Memory Research

Autobiographical Memory
The study of autobiographical memory seems to require a discussion of the phe-
nomenal properties of memory, yet this type of data has rarely been used in the
study of memory in contemporary cognitive psychology. By the phenomenal
properties of memory I mean the introspectively experienced aspects of the
recall process such as mental imagery. In several papers (Brewer, 1986; Brewer
& Pani, 1983), I have argued that the data from phenomenal experience deserve
the same treatment as any other form of data and must be accounted for in any
complete scientific psychology (cf. Ericsson & Simon, 1980; Hilgard, 1980; Nat-
soulas, 1970).

Survey Research
Although the issue of what forms of data are appropriate for the study of mem-
ory is still somewhat controversial, it seems to me that the researchers in the
area of survey research should feel free to use a wider range of questions. It may
be a while before full use can be made of these sources of information, since the
basic research in this area is still in the early stages. For example, the relation-
ship between visual imagery and memory accuracy has not been worked out (cf.
Brewer, 1988). Several researchers (Brewer, 1992; Neisser & Harsch, 1992)
have suggested that strength of memory imagery may be more closely related to
the rememberer's belief about the accuracy of a memory than to the actual accu-
racy of the memory, but there are little clear data on this issue.
Blair and Burton (1987) are quite cautious in introducing data about respond-
ent memory strategies, yet this is an aspect of mental performance that subjects
have clear access to and therefore it should not be controversial. From my per-
spective, this is the type of work needed to provide a basic research foundation
for the more applied problems of survey research.
 William F. Brewer 15

Information in Personal Memory

Autobiographical Memory
The initial research on the topic of autobiographical memory (e.g., M. Linton,
1975) tended to focus on time as the core information of interest in this area. It
was never clear how the time information was to be represented, but some in-
vestigators in the laboratory study of memory suggested that memory represen-
tations might contain time tags (Anisfeld & Knapp, 1968; Yntema & Trask,
1963).
My recent analyses of personal memory (Brewer, 1986, 1988) suggest that
this form of memory typically contains information about location, people, and
the actions of people but very limited information about absolute time. It ap-
pears that when asked questions about the absolute date of an event, people usu-
ally do not retrieve particular episodic information but generate the answer from
other types of information in memory or from generic memory. For example, I
recall having a conversation at Allerton House with Norbert Schwarz. I recall
that we were standing in a doorway and that we talked about the German aca-
demic system. However, if I try to recall what the time was, I can only generate
an answer by recalling that it was dark and that we were near a table with drinks;
therefore, it must have been early evening.

Survey Research
The analysis of the contents of personal memory seems directly relevant to sur-
vey research questions about the time of events (see Bradburn, Huttenlocher, &
Hedges, chap. 13, and Skowronski, Betz, Thompson, Walker, & Shannon, chap.
14, this volume). Thus, when someone is asked, "When is the last time you ate
broccoli?" many of the responses will actually be derived from generic memory
-for example, "Humm, I think I had broccoli last week, and we usually have it
on Wednesdays so it must have been last Wednesday." On this issue, my con-
clusions derived from recent work in autobiographical memory are in nice agree-
ment with recent work in survey research (e.g., Blair & Burton, 1987; Sudman
& Schwarz, 1989). It is not clear to me what the full implications of this issue
are for the problems of survey research, but it does suggest that survey research-
ers' might want to compare the information obtained from questions that probe
specific episodic memory with the information obtained from questions that
probe generic memory (see Smith and Jobe, chap. 8, this volume).

Forgetting in Autobiographical Memory

Autobiographical Memory
The initial studies of the recognition of self-selected autobiographical events (M.
Linton, 1978; Wagenaar, 1986) appeared to show little or no forgetting of such
16 1. Autobiographical Memory and Survey Research

events for up to a year. However, in these studies the items were selected to be
the most memorable events that occurred in a given day.
In a recent study with undergraduate subjects and randomly sampled events
(Brewer, 1988), I found a considerably faster rate of forgetting. These subjects
showed recognition scores of roughly 70% after 5 months. With a recall task,
the rate of forgetting for randomly selected items was even greater. On the cued-
recall task, the number of correct recalls of actions varied from 20% to 60%
depending on the type of cue used.

Survey Research
It is not clear to me that the recent findings on rate of forgetting for autobio-
graphical memory are news for researchers in the area of survey research. How-
ever, the finding that there is a fairly substantial rate of forgetting for personal
memories over time does suggest that researchers should be sensitive to the
issue when asking questions about personal memories that could have occurred
quite some time in the past (e.g., "What was the name of the last magazine that
you purchased at a newsstand?").

Event Characteristics Related to Memory

Autobiographical Memory
A number of researchers have attempted to discover which characteristics of
events lead to superior memory. M. Linton (1979), Wagenaar (1986), and R. T.
White (1982) all found that low-frequency (unique) autobiographical events
were remembered better than high-frequency events. Wagenaar (1986) and
White (1982) found that events with high emotional content were remembered
better than neutral events. In my study of randomly sampled autobiographical
events (Brewer, 1988), subjects showed good recall and recognition for low-
frequency events and for events occurring in low-frequency locations. In that
study, memory for subject's thoughts was best predicted by high scores on a
scale of how "exciting" the thoughts were. Experiment 2 of that study examined
the role of different types of information as cues to recall. The ranking of cues in
terms of retrieval value (from best to worst) was (a) the action being carried out,
(b) the thoughts occurring during the event, (c) the location and the time of the
event (given together), (d) the location (alone), and (d) the time of the event
(date plus day of the week plus time of day).

Survey Research
The data on the role of event characteristics in forgetting suggest that a re-
searcher who wants information about particular episodic events needs to take
event frequency into account Questions about an instance of a class of repeated
events will have to be restricted to a short temporal horizon, whereas questions
 William F. Brewer 17

about fairly infrequent events can cover a longer temporal span. As a practical
matter, this would seem to work out well for the survey researcher, since for rare
events the survey researcher has to ask questions that span long time intervals in
order to obtain enough data for analysis, whereas for frequent events a short
time interval should produce enough instances for analysis (cf. Sudman &
Schwarz, 1989).

Accuracy of Autobiographical Memory

Autobiographical Memory
Theories about the accuracy of autobiographical memory have covered a rather
extreme range of positions.

Copy Theories
In many early accounts of personal memory, theorists adopted the view that
personal memories are more or less exact copies of the original experience.
Thus, Hobbes (1651/1952) gave an account of memory images in terms of decay-
ing sensations. He appeared to view personal memories as copies of the original
sensations that had faded over time. The copy approach to personal memory
continued in philosophy over the centuries. For example, Furlong (1951) pro-
posed that personal memories were a representation of an individual's "whole
state of mind of the past occasion" (p. 83). The copy approach was also indi-
rectly supported by the reports of M. Linton (1978) and Wagenaar (1986), which
showed little forgetting of personal memories over periods of a year or more.

Strong Reconstructive Theories

Recently, the copy theories have come under criticism by a number of research-
ers (cf. Neisser, 1982b). The basic line of attack has been to point out examples
of reconstructive memory processes in other forms of memory, give some an-
ecdotal examples of errors in personal memory, and then reject the copy ap-
proach. A strong form of the reconstructive position can be seen in the work of
Barclay (1986), who stated that "memories for most everyday life events are,
therefore, transformed, distorted, or forgotten" (p. 89).

A Partially Reconstructive Theory

In my discussions of the issue of the accuracy of personal memory, I have taken
an intermediate position. In Brewer (1986), I reviewed the literature on this topic
and concluded that there was little strong evidence to support either the copy
position or the strong reconstructive view. I noted that support for the copy
theory may derive from the theorists' strong beliefs in the veridicality of their
own personal memories and pointed out that this was not a very powerful form
of support. I also argued that the anecdotal evidence collected by the proponents
18 1. Autobiographical Memory and Survey Research

of the strong reconstructive position was not very convincing. I outlined a par-
tially reconstructive view in which recent (days to weeks) personal memories
are reasonably accurate copies of an individual's original phenomenal experi-
ences but that schema-based reconstructive processes (Brewer & Nakamura,
1984; Rumelhart, 1980) operate on these memories just as they do in other
forms of memory.
My empirical study of randomly selected autobiographical events (Brewer,
1988) allowed a direct examination of the issue of the accuracy of personal mem-
ories. In Experiment 2 of that study, subjects carried a random alarm device and
wrote down a description of identifying information (location, time) and the
events that were occurring (actions, thoughts, etc.) when the alarm device pro-
duced a signal. At several intervals over the next months, these subjects were
asked to recall the original events in a cued-recall task. It was then possible to
compare the subjects' recalls with their original descriptions of the autobio-
graphical events. The data showed that subjects made many retrieval errors (i.e.,
given a retrieval cue, they recalled the wrong event). However, when subjects
retrieved an appropriate event, the recalls were usually accurate with a small
number (1.5%) of clear reconstructive errors. I interpreted these findings as sup-
port for the partially reconstructive view of personal memory.

Flashbulb Memory
Recently, the issue of memory accuracy has been discussed in the closely related
area of flashbulb memory. In this section, I briefly review these issues as they
have been debated in this area. The construct "flashbulb memory" was intro-
duced by R. Brown and Kulik (1977) to account for memories of the circum-
stances of hearing about a highly surprising and consequential event (e.g., "Can
you remember where you were when you heard about the assassination of John
F. Kennedy?").

Copy Theories
The original Brown and Kulik (1977) paper was clear copy theory. They stated
that flashbulb memories were produced by a special biological "now print!"
mechanism that was "very like a photograph that indiscriminately preserves the
scene" (p. 74). In another place, they stated that at the moment of hearing about
the Kennedy assassination, "much of the world stopped still to have its picture
taken" (p. 80). Brown and Kulik carried out a study of memories of the Kennedy
assassination and reported that after 13 years only 1% of their subjects appeared
to show forgetting of the circumstances in which they had heard about the event.

Strong Reconstructive Theories

Neisser (1982b) developed a strong theoretical attack of copy theories in the
area of flashbulb memory. However, the evidence that he used in this critique
was predominantly anecdotal, and later observations by C. P. Thompson and
 William F. Brewer 19

Cowan (1986) show that Neisser's own flashbulb memory report for the bomb-
ing of Pearl Harbor was much more accurate than he thought.
In a recent paper, Neisser and Harsch (1992) describe an important new em-
pirical investigation of flashbulb memory. Roughly 24 hours after the explosion
of the space shuttle Challenger, they collected data on memory of hearing about
the event, and they obtained recalls of the circumstances of hearing of the event
2 X and 3 years later. They report that only 7% of the subjects showed perfect
recalls and that 25% of the recalls were completely inaccurate. They take these
data to support a strong reconstructive view of flashbulb memory.
A Partially Reconstructive Theory
In a recent paper (Brewer, 1992), I reviewed the literature on flashbulb memory
and opted for a partially reconstructive approach in this area as I had earlier in
the area of personal memory. In the review of the flashbulb literature, I argued
that there was little evidence, other than the intuitions of the investigators, to
support the copy theory. For example, Brown and Kulik's (1977) data on the
Kennedy assassination were gathered 13 years after the original event and there-
fore can provide no empirical support for the accuracy of these recalls. On the
other hand, I argued that Neisser and Harsch's (1992) data do not support the
strong reconstructive position. I suggested that many of the "reconstructive er-
rors" in their study are actually retrieval errors and not true reconstructive errors.
For example, Neisser and Harsch give an example of a subject who heard that
something had happened during a class and then went back to her room and
watched TV accounts of the explosion. Several years later she recalled that she
first found out about the explosion from watching TV. I suggested that in her
later recall she may have simply retrieved the wrong event (the emotional mo-
ment of seeing the ftrst pictures of the explosion) and that her description of
watching TV and calling her mother that night may well be an accurate memory.
However, there are other aspects of the Neisser and Harsch data that do seem to
be good evidence for true reconstructive errors. Therefore, I concluded that a
moderate reconstructive approach gives the best account of the accuracy of
flashbulb memories.

Survey Research
Memory accuracy is obviously a crucial issue for survey researchers. If the copy
theory or the strong reconstructive theory were correct, then there would be
strong consequences for survey research. If the copy theory were correct, then
survey researchers could have complete confidence in information obtained
from questions that tap personal memory. If the strong reconstructive theory
were correct, then the data obtained from questions about personal memory
would be highly questionable.
However, if the moderate reconstructive view were the correct account of
personal memory, there should be little impact on the survey area, since this
view is consistent with what I expect is the working assumption in the area-
20 1. Autobiographical Memory and Survey Research

answers to survey questions give reasonably accurate accounts of the events, but
they also include a moderate percentage of erroneous information. The degree of
reconstruction will, of course, depend on a variety of factors, some of which
have been discussed earlier. For example, the data in Brewer (1988) suggest that
responses to questions about the time of an event's occurrence are much more
likely to be reconstructed than are qualitative reports about the nature of an
event that did, in fact, occur.

Conclusions
It seems clear that basic research in autobiographical memory and survey re-
search have much to offer each other. It is comforting to find a convergence of
data and theory in the two areas. Of the topics discussed above, the one where I
think survey researchers have the most to contribute to cognitive psychology is
the issue of how subjects use episodic and generic information to answer ques-
tions. This seems like an important practical issue for survey research, and in-
vestigations of this topic should contribute to the basic issues of knowledge
representation in human memory. As the areas of autobiographical memory and
survey research continue to mature in the future, there should be much useful
theoretical and empirical interchange.