ABSTRACT
What is autobiographical memory for? Currently, only commonsense answers are possible to this question. Essentially, autobiographical memory appears to be for almost every major aspect of cognition one might care to consider, but has no specific role in any particular activity, with the possible exception of writing one’s memoirs (and even here it informs rather than constrains). To be sure, there have been studies of how autobiographical memories are used in discourse, social interactions, and even problem solving (Hyman & Faries, 1992; Pillemer, 1992; Ross, 1984) and the findings from these studies provide clues to some of the functions of autobiographical remembering, but they do not answer the question “What is it for?” But surely, it might be countered, autobiographical memory is central to the self, to identity, to emotional experience, and to all those attributes that define an individual. A person without an autobiographical memory would have no self, no identity, no way of responding to the world emotionally. Autobiographical memory may, indeed, be critical to self, it may constitute the knowledge base of the self (Conway & Rubin, 1993), and it may function as a resource of the self (Robinson, 1986; Salaman, 1970), but if this is the major function then that function is nebulous, intangible, and intrinsically slippery. There is nothing specific about it, nothing on which one could put one’s finger.
