ABSTRACT
Autobiographical memory has been a fruitful areas of study over the past few decades (Brewer, 1996; Conway, 1990; Conway & Rubin, 1993; Conway, Rubin, Spinnler, & Wagenaar, 1992; Jobe, Tourangeau, & Smith, 1993; Neisser & Fivush, 1994; Rubin, 1986, 1996, 1998; Schwarz & Sudman, 1994). Because older adults have more life to remember, much of this work has been integrated into the study of cognitive aging. Here, I concentrate on how autobiographical memories are distributed over the lifespan, both because it is one topic for which we have a good quantitative description and because clear differences exist in the availability of autobiographical memories from different parts of the life span.
