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The semantic representation of event information depends on the cue-modality: The organization and selection of event information revisited

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Author

Summary, in English

The semantic content, or the meaning, is the essence of autobiographical memories. In comparison to previous research, which has mainly focused on the phenomenological experience and the age distribution of retrieved events, the present study provides a novel view on the retrieval of event information by quantifying the information as semantic representations. The aim of the study was to investigate the semantic representation of cued autobiographical memories and to study the modality hierarchy within the multimodal retrieval cues. The experiment comprised a cued recall task, where the participants were presented with unimodal or multimodal retrieval cues and asked to recall autobiographical events. The results indicated that the three different unimodal as well as the multimodal retrieval cues generate significantly different semantic representations. Further, the visual modality contributed the most to the semantic representation of the multimodally retrieved events, followed by the auditory and the olfactory modalities. Finally, the multimodal condition can also be described as a combination of the three unimodal conditions. In conclusion, these results suggest that event information is retrieved based on meaning and that there is a modality hierarchy within the multimodal retrieval cues, where the visual modality dominates.

Publishing year

2013

Language

English

Pages

8-73378

Publication/Series

PLoS ONE

Volume

8

Issue

10

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Public Library of Science (PLoS)

Topic

  • Psychology

Keywords

  • Events
  • autobiographical memory
  • semantic representation
  • latent semantic analysis
  • multimodal
  • unimodal
  • multisensory

Status

Published

Project

  • Semantic Spaces

Research group

  • Division of Cognitive Psychology

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1932-6203