ABSTRACT
Memorable personal events have many aspects. Inevitably these events involve some sort of action or activity performed at a specific location and time, during some more general life period. Such events are often carried out in pursuit of some goal and/or in response to some prior event, and are often accompanied by thoughts and emotions. In addition, these events may involve a variety of actors and objects, and they may be evaluated on a number of dimensions, both as they take place and in retrospect. In principle, any of these aspects (i.e., activity, location, period, participants, causes, effects, affects, goals, objects, reactions, evaluations) may be encoded in memory as part of one's knowledge of events, and any of them may serve to index events for retrieval. In practice, however, some aspects will typically be encoded, and others will not. Determining which aspects do play an important role in autobiographical memory is an empirical issue.
