Memories of Life Events

Memories of Life Events

Without a doubt, the three transcripts reveal age-related effects of neutral and emotional autobiographical memories. There are strings of non-episodic and episodic details in the information that indicate the extent of memory loss among different aging adults. While it is easy for the aged people to recall emotional events that occurred in their childhood, their memory loss leads to lack of clarity in recollection. Statistically, impaired recall of episodic moments and semantic autobiographical memory aspects are more common in the elderly people than among young adults. Ideally, autobiographical memory is not entirely episodic (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2011). As observed in the transcripts, the authors integrate factual and semantic information not tied to a specific time or place.

	Transcript 1	Transcript 2	Transcript 3
Themes	War	Piano lessons	Classical Music
Lifetime periods	Vietnam War	Attending concerts	Playing trombone
Events	Singing	Singing hymn songs	Membership of a school band
Episodic memories	Playing piano	Methodist church	Russian concerts
Percentage recakk	45%	60%	70%

Table 1: Results

The results in table 1 show that each transcript author recalled defining moments in their lives. Irrespective, their advancing age wields a significant impact on their memories and writing skills. In the first transcript, the elderly writer can barely give a concise account of her niece. It is hard for any reader to make sense of her story. In the second transcript, the writer’s passion for playing piano allows him to recollect the memories of his piano teacher, Chopin books, and participation in Methodist church services. Regardless, constant repetition betrays his memory loss. The last transcript explains the author’s love for classical music. Though age has gotten up with him, he still attends concerts. He also admits his poor memory but can remember the names of Russian classical music players. Similar to the second writer, his transcript has a lot of repetitions, a symptom of memory loss.

In summary, all the three transcript writers are old and memory loss affects them. In all cases, the writers are unaware of their repetitions and incomplete information. It is even worse for the first writer, where his recollection scarcely makes sense. In episodic memory tasks like these, deteriorations are evident. They confirm Baddeley & Wilson’s (2014) research that link autobiographical memory recall to age-related memory decline.

References

Baddeley, A., & Wilson, B. (2014). 13 Amnesia, Autobiographical Memory, and Confabulation. Autobiographical Memory, 225.

Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2011). The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System. Psychological Review, 107(2), 261.