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According to Conway's view, Autobiographical memory (AM) construction is accompanied by control processes. These processes range from filtering out relevant memories according to the current context, to generating or elaborating appropriate retrieval cues. These processes can be conceptualised as metacognition, the ability to control and monitor cognitive processes. Experimentally, little has been carried out to support the idea that metacognition is involved in AM. To assess this, we designed a task, the Feeling of Retrieval. Participants had to predict whether cue words would facilitate AM access (i.e., fluent access cues) or not (i.e., limited access cues) in a limited time (either 1 (Exp. 2) or 2 (Exp. 1) s). Later, they retrieved memories in response to both types of cues. Results show that cues judged as fluent access led to better AM generation, as illustrated by AM retrieval latency and a subjective measure of the ease with which the AMs were retrieved. These rapid predictions may rely on epistemic feelings and / or other mnemonic cues such as a partial retrieval of information. This metacognitive access to the earliest stages of AM retrieval illustrates the ability to monitor AM processes as proposed by Conway (2005).

In this article we present a review of research on the IAM Task, whereby memories are cued by self-images in the form of "I am … " statements, such as I am a grandfather, I am a Bob Dylan fan, I am from Darlington, I am a Psychologist. Such cues are particularly successful at accessing memories associated with the formation of specific aspects of the self. We describe the conceptual and historical context for the development of our task and review findings from other researchers who have used the same basic design. We present aggregate data and examples from across several experiments, examining how these patterns change in psychological distress and dysfunction. We also discuss research on "I will be" statements and how these have been adopted to examine self-related future cognitions. We conclude that the working self operates to organise memory retrieval and make accessible episodic and semantic material for self-relevant periods across the lifespan. Moreover, accessibility of self-images can be modulated by retrieval of autobiographical memories, highlighting Conway's bidirectional relationship between memory and the self. We provide suggestions for future research and for the first time provide a standardised version of our IAM Task for use by researchers.

Jamais vu is a phenomenon operationalised as the opposite of déjà vu, i.e. finding subjectively unfamiliar something that we know to be familiar. We sought to document that the subjective experience of jamais vu can be produced in word alienation tasks, hypothesising that déjà vu and jamais vu are similar experiential memory phenomena. Participants repeatedly copied words until they felt "peculiar", had completed the task, or had another reason to stop. About two-thirds of all participants (in about one-third of all trials) reported strange subjective experiences during the task. Participants reported feeling peculiar after about thirty repetitions, or one minute. We describe these experiences as jamais vu. This experimentally induced phenomenon was related to real-world experiences of unfamiliarity. Although we replicated known patterns of correlations with déjà vu (age and dissociative experiences), the same pattern was not found for our experimental analogue of jamais vu, suggesting some differences between the two phenomena. However, in daily life, those people who had déjà vu more frequently also had jamais vu more frequently. Findings are discussed with reference to the progress that has been made in déjà vu research in recent years, with a view to fast-tracking our understanding of jamais vu.

Déjà vu occurs when a novel event is experienced with an erroneous sense of familiarity. Memory researchers theorise that this arises due to an error in the processes underlying the recognition memory system. Research has indicated that there may be a link between high levels of anxiety and increased frequency and intensity of déjà vu, however, there has been a comparatively little characterisation of déjà vu as experienced by individuals with clinical anxiety. We used an online questionnaire to collect data from individuals self-reporting a clinical diagnosis of anxiety, as well as from age-matched controls. The Anxiety Group reported a significantly higher frequency of déjà vu episodes over the previous month than controls. They also reported experiencing déjà vu more frequently and with higher intensity during periods of high anxiety. In addition, the Anxiety Group reported finding déjà vu episodes significantly more distressing than the Control Group. The findings indicate that there are differences in déjà vu experienced by people reporting high levels of anxiety compared to healthy controls without an anxiety diagnosis. We discuss structural and neural mechanisms thought to underpin déjà vu in relation to these results.

It is considered that an individual's current self-concept plays a crucial role in guiding the retrieval of autobiographical memory. Using a novel fluency paradigm, the present research examined whether or not the reverse is also true, that is, does memory retrieval influence the description of the conceptual self? Specifically, this study examined the effect of prior autobiographical reverie on the subsequent retrieval of stored self-concepts. Participants wrote a description of a personally relevant memory or a control topic (of no relevance to the self), following which they had 60 seconds to generate as many self-defining statements as possible, each beginning with I am. Participants engaging in autobiographical retrieval generated significantly more statements than those in the control condition, suggesting that autobiographical retrieval increased access to self-concepts. Type of statement also varied according to group. Participants in the autobiographical memory condition were more likely to conceptualise themselves in relation to their psychological traits, and this was replicated in a second experiment conducted online. Findings support the idea that self and episodic memory are highly related constructs, and are discussed in relation to implications for individuals with autobiographical memory deficits.

In the Remember-Know paradigm whether a Know response is defined as a high-confidence state of certainty or a low-confidence state based on familiarity varies across researchers and can influence participants' responses. The current experiment was designed to explore differences between the states of Know and Familiar. Participants studied others' justification statements to "Know" recognition decisions and separated them into two types. Crucially, participants were not provided definitions of Know and Familiar on which to sort the items--their judgements were based solely on the phenomenology described in the justifications. Participants' sorting decisions were shown to reliably map onto expert classification of Know and Familiar. Post-task questionnaire responses demonstrated that both the level of memory detail and confidence expressed in the justifications were central to how participants categorised the items. In sum, given no instructions to do so, participants classify Familiar and Know according to two dimensions: confidence and amount of information retrieved.

We present the case of a 13-year-old boy, CJ, with profound episodic memory difficulties following the diagnosis of a metastatic intracranial germ cell tumour and subsequent treatment with radiotherapy and chemotherapy. At the core of this study is the first application of SenseCam to a child with severe memory impairment. CJ was taken for a walk while he was wearing SenseCam. This included visiting four different locations. We manipulated the number of locations he could review on SenseCam "films" and then tested recognition memory (forced choice) for both reviewed and non-reviewed locations. We also collected his justifications for the choices he made. Our results indicate that repeated viewings of SenseCam images support the formation of personal semantic memories. Overall our results suggest that the use of SenseCam in memory rehabilitation extends beyond supporting episodic memory and recollection, and supports the feasibility of its use with children who have marked memory difficulties.

SenseCams have many potential applications as tools for lifelogging, including the possibility of use as a memory rehabilitation tool. Given that a SenseCam can log hundreds of thousands of images per year, it is critical that these be presented to the viewer in a manner that supports the aims of memory rehabilitation. In this article we report a software browser constructed with the aim of using the characteristics of memory to organise SenseCam images into a form that makes the wealth of information stored on SenseCam more accessible. To enable a large amount of visual information to be easily and quickly assimilated by a user, we apply a series of automatic content analysis techniques to structure the images into "events", suggest their relative importance, and select representative images for each. This minimises effort when browsing and searching. We provide anecdotes on use of such a system and emphasise the need for SenseCam images to be meaningfully sorted using such a browser.