The book, Cognitive Psychology, states that autobiographical memory is “memory for dated events in a person’s life. Autobiographical memory is usually considered to be a type of episodic memory, but has also been defined as including personal semantic memories.” My grandmother was using her autobiographical memory when she shared stories of her life during World War II in Japan to my mother who past told them to me. One of the events she shared was when she was running through the streets of Tokyo while the city was being fire bombed. I was told stories of how her family survived during the war and how they went from being a well-to-do family to losing everything for the war effort.
Although I have not met my grandmother (she passed away some time before my parents met), I have not been to Japan and I was not alive during World War II. I use information I know about my grandmother, Japan and the war to picture these events in my mind by visual imagery. Cognitive Psychology also states that visual imagery is “a type of mental imagery involving vision, in which an image is experienced in the absence of a visual stimulus.” I am also using top-down processing, “processing that involves a person’s knowledge or expectations. This type of processing has also been called knowledge-based processing.”
My grandmother did not speak English and I do not speak Japanese but my mother learned English when she was a child and was able to pass these stories on to my sisters and I. I think it is really interesting how we can share our experiences through language and process the information into images.
Works Cited
Goldstein, E. Bruce. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience.Belmont: Wadsworth, 2011. print