COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 17, 89-137 (198.5) Knowledge Structures in the Organization and Retrieval of Autobiographical Memories BRIAN J. REISER,JOHN B. BLACK, AND ROBEKT P. ABELSON In this paper. the role of knowledge structures in organizing and retrieving autobiographical experiences is investigated. It is proposed that autobiographical events are organized in memory by the knowledge structures that guided com- prehension and planning during the experience. Individual experiences are re- trieved from memory by first accessing the knowledge structures used to encode the event, then using information in those structures to predict features of the target event, thus directing search to paths likely to lead to that event. Two types of structures are investigated as candidates for these organizing contexts. Acti\,- ities are sequences of actions petfot-med to achieve a goal, while genrrd acrions are situation-free components occurring as part of several activities and represent what is common to that action across those activities. It is predicted that activities are more important in retrieving experiences. because (I) these structures con- stitute the principal contexts used to store experiences and (2) information con- tained within these structures is more useful for predicting features of target events. The greater utility of activities in retrieving experiences was demonstrated in two autobiographical memory retrieval time experiments. First, retrieval of a personal experience matching an activity and action combination was faster when subjects were given an activity cue before a general action cue. because pro- cessing could get a “head start” when the activity context was presented first. Second, specifying an activity and action led to faster memory retrievals than specifying only the action, while no such facilitation occurred when an activity was augmented by a general action. In both experiments, retrieval was slowed when more processing was required to infer probable features of the target ex- perience, as predicted by the directed nature of the search process. These ex- periments and this model provide a general framework for studying the organi- zation of events in autobiographical memory. c I’%47 Acadcmlc Prr\\. inc. INTRODUCTION A widespread use of memory in everyday cognition is the retrieval of personal or autobiographical experiences. Cognition relies not only on We are grateful to John Anderson Lawrence Birnbaum, Albert Corbett. Janet Kolodner, Sara Jones, Lawrence Hunter, John Morton. and two anonymous rcvicwers for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Conversations with Jim Galambos were helpful in formulating the ideas discussed in this paper. We also thank Claudia Worrell and Maren Jones for assistance in the collection and analysis of the data. A preliminary report of these results was presented at the Fourth Annual Cognitive Science Conference. 1982. This research was supported by grants from the System Development Foundation and the Sloan Foundation to the Cognitive Science Program at Yale University. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to Brian J. Reiser, Department of Psychology. Carnegie- Mellon University, Pittsburgh. PA 15213. x9