Does the state of our cognitive abilities affect the self?

A lot of our sense of self is embedded in our autobiographical memory – the memory of our life event, our "life story".  People usually don’t remember events that happened prior to the age of 4, and remember more events from the last 5 to 10 years of their lives.  People also tend to remember more events from the period when they were between the ages of 10 to 30 than from other periods of their lives. 

 Why?

 New and unique events happen in adolescence and early adulthood, among them events that are important for our self identity.   Due to their uniqueness, these events are kept in memory better.  They are also retrieved better, since they serve as examples to similar events encountered later in life.  This phenomenon of more memories between the ages of 10 to 30 has a cognitive explanation as well:  the cognitive systems and the memory systems (like working memory and long term memory) function optimally at this period of time.  That's why storage and retrieval of memories formed at this period is better.

The cognitive explanation for the phenomenon of more memories in the age range of 10-30 is related to the basic systems approach to autobiographical memory.  This approach argues that autobiographical memory depends on other cognitive systems since it involves the senses (the memory of an event involves sights, smells, tastes, sounds and touch) as well as language and emotions.  A deficiency in one of the cognitive systems will lead, according to this approach, to a deficiency in the content of autobiographical memory.

What do we know about success in verbal and visuospatial memory tests?  Women outperform men on verbal memory tests, while males outperform women on visuospatial memory tests.  Higher educated people succeed more on verbal and visuospatial memory tests than lower educated people.  Adolescents and young adults perform better on these tests than middle aged adults, and middle aged adults outperform older adults.  Performance on visuospatial memory tests reaches a higher peak in adolescence and early adulthood and deteriorates more steeply in middle age and older adulthood than performance on verbal memory tests.

One way to measure autobiographical memory is to compare between retrieval of a personal event right after its occurrence and retrieval of the same event after a while.  This procedure is usually done with the aid of diaries.  As the time gap between the event's occurrence and its retrieval lengthens, retrieval deteriorates.  Retrieval is affected by the valence of the event, its frequency (if it's very frequent it will be difficult to distinguish it from other similar events happening before or after this event, and so it will be harder to remember this specific event), and the amount of reminiscence (how much the person recalled this event in the time period between its occurrence and the point in time when memory for the event is tested).

This research

The relation between verbal and visuospatial memory and autobiographical memory. 

Kristo, Rouw, Murre and Janssen

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810014001792

was performed, like many other recent studies, through the internet.  The researchers created an internet site which has various memory tests, among them verbal and visuospatial tests, as well as questionnaires about autobiographical memories.  The site is open for every person who registers and takes as many tests as he wishes, when he wishes.

617 people wrote in the internet site about a personal event that occurred in the three days prior to writing.  They wrote, according to the researcher's requests, about the essence of the event, who was involved, where and when the event took place and described one important and one unimportant detail of the event.  They also rated the event's importance and emotional importance and its frequency.  The same people also took verbal and visuospatial memory tests.  After a period of 2,7,14,30 and 45 days the researchers contacted the participants (by email) and asked them about the events that they had previously described.

People who performed better on verbal and visuospatial memory tests performed better on the autobiographical memory tests (remembered the events better) than participants of the same age group that did less well on the verbal and visuospatial memory tests.  The ability to remember the personal event was more strongly related to the scores on the verbal memory tests than to the scores on the visuospatial memory tests.  The researchers suggest that a possible reason for this is that they did not ask visuospatial questions about the personal event (not at the time of writing nor at the later time).  Focusing attention on visuospatial aspects of the event might have contributed to a stronger relation between visuospatial memory and memory of the event.