Recent theories distinguish between directly and generatively retrieved autobiographical memories, focusing primarily on voluntary retrieval. However, involuntary memories are often implicitly assumed to be directly retrieved. This raises an intriguing question: what about involuntary memories that surface minutes, hours, or days after encountering a cue? Should these still be classified as involuntary, or are they more akin to generative memories, which typically involve effort and time? In this talk, I will present and discuss data that challenge the conventional understanding of generative and direct retrieval as being exclusively associated with voluntary memory processes.

Cognitive-components of being on the autism spectrum (AS) manifest differently across genders (Bölte et al., 2011). Although AS individuals retrieve fewer autobiographical memories (particularly highly-contextualised/specific) than neurotypical-individuals (Goddard et al., 2013), there is a lack of evidence about the impact of gender. This study examined gender-differences in autobiographical memory (ABM) retrieval in adults. ASD participants (25 male, 25 female) were tested against non-ASD controls (25 male, 25 female) on measures of autistic traits; depression, anxiety, and stress; implicit and explicit measures of memory specificity; verbal fluency; and involuntary autobiographical memory traits. No differences were observed in explicit measures of memory specificity, verbal fluency and involuntary memory traits as a function of ASD group or gender. However, the ASD group had lower memory specificity in the implicit memory task regardless of gender, as well as significantly higher depression, anxiety, and stress scores. Involuntary memory traits were also related to depression scores.

While recent research has documented young children’s ability to recall events spontaneously, longitudinal data is lacking. As a novel approach we ran a case study exploring how spontaneous recall develops over time in two girls aged 26 months and 44 months.
By use of a systematic diary method (see Berntsen, 1996), we followed the two girls across 6 months and registered characteristics such as: number of days since the remembered event took place, the cue triggering the memory, and the emotional valence of the event. Additionally, we asked the children to strategically recall events reported in the diaries (so that we knew for certain they previously had been encoded and remembered). Results are currently being analyzed and will be ready for the conference. We expect to find similar results to Hjuler et al. (2023) showing that 34–36-month-olds spontaneous memories are often positive, and triggered by ‘objects’ or ‘something said’.

Traditional theories of autobiographical memory retrieval have proposed that retrieving a specific life event typically involves effortful hierarchical search and retrieval of increasingly specific information before bringing a particular event to mind (“generative retrieval”). More recently, studies using self-report have shown that people sometimes report search, but also often report that memories come directly to mind in response to a cue with no search or additional information required (“direct retrieval”). In the current series of experiments, we aimed to examine evidence for distinct cognitive processes underlying self-reported direct and generative retrieval. We found evidence that self-report aligns with objective measures including pupillometry and blink rate as well as differential impacts of concurrent tasks, suggesting that direct retrieval involves less executive load and more visual processing than generative retrieval. We discuss implications for models of autobiographical memory retrieval.