You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled as “Prevalence of direct retrieval in autobiographical memory: Effects of ageing and clinical implications” by the Department of Psychology
Date: 12 December 2025, Friday
Place: A-130 FEASS Seminar Room
Time: 12:30
Title: Prevalence of direct retrieval in autobiographical memory: Effects of ageing and clinical implications
Speaker: Lia Kvavilashvili, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK
Abstract
Growing evidence shows that spontaneous cognitions in the form of mind-wandering, involuntary autobiographical memories, semantic mind-pops, and future thinking are prevalent in daily lives of children and adults across the life span. While research on voluntary forms of episodic and autobiographical memories shows substantial decrements with ageing, studies on spontaneous cognitions have shown small or no age effects, indicating that cue-driven, bottom-up retrieval processes are preserved in typical ageing. Importantly, recent research on voluntary autobiographical memory has shown that such automatic bottom-up retrieval processes are prevalent even in laboratory experiments in which memories often seem to pop into mind in response to a cue word (e.g., cake) without participant using any strategic or generative retrieval to recall a memory.
In this talk, I will present several studies on the effects of age on autobiographical recall, using a laboratory cue-word paradigm, introduced by Uzer et al. (2012), that distinguishes directly (effortlessly) versus generatively (effortfully) retrieval in autobiographical memory. The results of these studies consistently show very high rates of direct retrieval (around 70%) and importantly, no age effects in the number or percentages of directly recalled memories. By contrast, people with Mild Cognitive Impairment, who have increased chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease, did not show the prevalence of direct retrieval that was present in normally ageing older adults. Clinical implications of these findings will be discussed in the light of spontaneous retrieval deficit hypothesis (Kvavilashvili et al., 2020), which stipulates that people at prodromal stages of Alzheimer’s disease have disproportionate reductions in spontaneous cue-driven retrieval processes.
Bio
Lia Kvavilashvili is a Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the School of Health, Medical and Life Sciences at the University of Hertfordshire. She completed her undergraduate and PhD degrees in Tbilisi, Georgia before moving to UK as a Royal Society Postgraduate Fellow to work with Juli Ellis at the Cardill University in 1993. In 1995, she moved to the University of Hertfordshire where she is based now. Her research focuses on memory functioning cross the life span using a variety of research methods (laboratory, naturalistic ambulatory assessments, paper and smartphone diaries, etc.).
Her main expertise lies in the field of memory and ageing with a particular emphasis on those memory tasks and phenomena that are mediated by spontaneous retrieval processes, such as mind-wandering, involuntary and intrusive memories, repetitive musical “earworms” (songs and melodies that pop into mind), prospective memory and spontaneous future thinking. She has been developing new methods to enable to capture and measure these elusive phenomena in and outside the laboratory.
Clinical areas of research cover a wide range of topics including early cognitive markers of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, intrusive memories in clinical and non-clinical populations and auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia.