Memories Difference: Involuntary Memory and Voluntary Memory

In everyday life, in contrast, there are many cases in which memories come to us, so to speak, without any deliberate effort being made by us. Such memories are generally referred to as involuntary memories (or “mind popping”, “thoughts that come unbidden”, “involuntary remembering”, etc.).

This essay is prepared with the aim of explaining in detail the difference between involuntary memory and voluntary memory. I shall start our paper by giving precise definitions of our key concepts from which I shall go on into the main body of the discussion. I shall finally draw a comprehensive conclusion.

Involuntary memory, also known as involuntary explicit memory, involuntary conscious memory, involuntary aware memory, and most commonly, involuntary memory, is a subcomponent of memory that occurs when cues encountered in everyday life evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort. Voluntary memory, its binary opposite, is characterized by a deliberate effort to recall the past (Tulving, E., and Donaldson, W. (1972).

We can further define the two key terms by stating that, Involuntary memories are explicit memories of personal events that come to mind with no preceding attempt at retrieval (Berntsen, 2009). Their counterpart is voluntary memories – that is, personal memories that follow a controlled, strategic retrieval process. Memory studies have concentrated on the latter.

Humans have an extraordinary ability to recollect our personal past and imagine our potential future. Sometimes this happens as a result of a deliberate and consciously initiated process. However, just as frequently, memories of past events and images of possible future events arise involuntarily, that is, with no preceding attempt to produce them (Berntsen, 1996).

Most “formal” situations in which memory is involved entail voluntary, controlled retrieval. The best examples are achievement tests, in which students must probe their memories for a solicited piece of information. In fact, most laboratory studies on memory, like those involving free recall tasks, paired associates tasks and general information questions, attempt to tap voluntary retrieval. In terms of the pathway metaphor, voluntary memories involve building a path to our memories. In everyday life too, controlled recall is common, but it may also be private, as when one thinks back on previous experiences without intending to give a memory report. One example is when one is walking alone, or reflecting about one’s past before going to sleep. Each recollection is presumably coloured by previous recollections, and affects subsequent recollections. Important episodes are certainly recollected several times. Frequently recollected episodes become schematized. Schematization presumably implies a dilution of the distinction between experienced and inferred information (Neisser, 1967).

As will be discussed later, voluntary retrieval involves a variety of metacognitive processes that monitor and control the course of remembering, assessing the truth value of the retrieved information, regulating recall, filling up the gaps and engaging in reconstructive processes. Voluntary retrieval generally serves some function. Obviously, in achievement tests the goal of the person is to provide the correct answer. The same is true of many TV games. Personal, private search of one’s memory is also often driven by the desire to ascertain what “really” happened (Kvavilashvili, L., and Mandler, G. (2004).

Involuntary memories compared with voluntary memories, are more frequently about specific episodes and they tend to have more mood impact at the time of retrieval (e.G., Berntsen and Hall, 2004). They are also often rated as less central to the life story and identity (Berntsen, 2009,).

Most likely, these differences are caused by the fact that the retrieval of the involuntary memories generally needs a distinct cue-item match (Berntsen, Staugaard and Sørensen, 2012) that may favor specific episodes over more abstract event knowledge as well as the fact that the rapid and uncontrollable retrieval of involuntary memories leaves little room for antecedent emotion regulation. In summary, involuntary memories are common in daily life, their activation is facilitated by situational cues and they typically arise in situations with diffuse attention. They share many characteristics with voluntary memories, such as a dominance of emotionally positive events, but are the result of a more associative and context-sensitive form of retrieval that requires less effort. Involuntary memories are at least as frequent in daily life as voluntarily memories that are deliberately Berntsen, Staugaard and Sørensen, 2012.

Involuntary memories and future thoughts can be seen as related to the notions of mind wandering (e.G., Smallwood and Schooler, 2006), daydreaming and task-unrelated images and thought, which all refer to thought processes that arise in the absence of specific situational demands. The notions of daydreaming, mind wandering and task-unrelated thoughts are conceptually and empirically highly similar in that they are all broadly defined as the mental contents that occur when attention shifts away from a primary task and the person instead engages in private and internal thought processes (Goldstein, and Fortgang, 1970).

However, these notions differ from the concepts of involuntary memories and involuntary future thoughts in several important ways. First, the mental contents of daydreaming or mind wandering need not be episodic or. In contrast, involuntary memories and involuntary future thoughts by definition involve a mental experience of a personal event. Second, daydreaming and mind wandering can be volitional in that the person can intentionally choose to disengage from an external task in order to pursue an internal stream of thought (McMillan et al., 2013),

Cognitive theorists have considered involuntary memories as rare. For example, a scientist wanting to study them “can only sit and wait, hoping for the improbable” (Miller, 1962). Tulving (1983) argued that successful recall from the episodic memory system was contingent upon being in a retrieval mode. Only rarely would stimuli in the environment activate conscious episodic recollections through purely associative mechanisms outside retrieval mode. “Access to, or actualization of, information in the episodic system tends to be deliberate and usually requires conscious effort” (p. 46). “Few things that we perceive make us think of previous happenings in our own lives … many stimuli that could potentially serve as reminders or cues, even if prominently displayed to person, will have no such effect” (p. 169). Although Mandler (1989) acknowledged that “much of everyday memory experiences are in fact non-deliberate” (pp. 102–103) he also observed that , episodic knowledge is generally “deliberate, and consciously accessed, context dependent and ‘remembered’” whereas semantic knowledge “is often automatically available, context free and ‘known’” (p. 94).

In contrast to this view, it has been argued that involuntary and voluntary memories reflect the operations of the same underlying episodic memory system (Rubin, Boals, and Berntsen, 2008). In this view, the two types of memories differ only with regard to the mechanisms that bring them to mind at a particular moment, whereas their encoding and long-term maintenance is expected to be supported by the same mechanisms. For example, emotion at the time of encoding is expected to enhance the likelihood of subsequent recall, irrespective of whether retrieval is involuntary or voluntary.

The distinction between voluntary and involuntary memories is not sharp. Memory processes typically involve a mixture of the two modes of retrieval. Even when a controlled inspection of our memory is initiated in response to a query by an acquaintance (“What did you do when you were in Norway?” “What did you do on the last evening before your return home?”), certain aspects of the stored episodes may suggest themselves more readily than others, and new memory associations open up. Thus, the controlled travel through one’s memories may be diverted by involuntary memories despite our attempt to stay on the same memory path. Of course, the controlled search may also be guided by general knowledge of the event (e.G., that it used to get dark early; that we were with our friends) and also by abstract semantic knowledge (we know that the end of the year is at midnight, we know that snow is common in the Scandinavian winter, etc.).

Controlled, voluntary memories are generally submitted to an editing process in order to ensure that they satisfy certain criteria such as accuracy. The editing process becomes more stringent when a public report is involved. Involuntary memories, in contrast, jump into our minds as “unedited” raw data. Of course, some editing is likely to take place when we recount them (Jones, G.V. 1989).

The distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory was made, in fact, by Ebbinghaus (1885). He made a distinction between memories that occur “with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will” and memories that are called back “into consciousness by an exertion of the will” . Thus, involuntary memories are those that emerge spontaneously, sometimes unexpectedly, without any intent to conjure them up. Voluntary memories, in contrast, emerge in response to a controlled, goal-directed search, typically prompted by some requirement, and guided by the need to satisfy some general criterion (Goldsmith, M., and Koriat, A. 1999).

Involuntary memories are typically associated with certain phenomenological properties: a richer preservation of the original emotional and sensory features, a strong perception of vividness of the event and a feeling of “re-experiencing” the event. The memory sometimes has a perceptual quality (Goldsmith, M., and Koriat, A. 1999).

We re-experience an event or episode rather than retrieve its verbal content or its gist. Thus, spontaneous retrieval may produce memories more closely corresponding to the original experience. This is unlike voluntary memories, which tend to be more selective and more focused. Another distinctive feature concerns the retention interval: Berntsen found that involuntary memories tend to be more recent than voluntary memories. Most of the involuntary memories reported were about events that had taken place during the previous year (and at most during the past 3 years), whereas most of the voluntary memories referred to events that had happened over the past 4 years (Burke, MacKay Worthley, Jand Wade, E. 1991).

Involuntary memories also seem to differ from voluntary memories in their organization: When an event or episode come spontaneously to mind, its emergence into consciousness does not usually follow a logical, sequential organization. Rather, different facets of the event may pop up associatively into memory, without any clear order. One image may trigger another. The emergence of involuntary memories is relatively rapid; as though different features of an episode were being accessed in parallel. This is in contrast to voluntary memories, whose retrieval tends to be slow, sequential and laborious. Because voluntary memories are self-initiated, their retrieval is often guided by top-down programs that constrain the sequence in which they are conjured up (Bousfield, W.A., and Rosner, S.R. 1970).

We can finally conclude by stating that in everyday life, memory, in both its intentional and unintentional aspects, serves different functions (Glenberg, 1997). One remembers in order to solve various tasks, e.G., to answer questions, find one one’s way to desired goals, write a story, etc. Sometimes we have the phenomenological experience of remembering, as in cases of episodic memory, when we have the experience of travelling back in time. At other times we may not be conscious that we are solving a problem by memory support, or are relying on our memory while travelling through the town. When paths to memory are open and used, we are not always fully conscious of using these paths (Berntsen, D. 1998).

It has been observed that free thoughts and daydreaming, which involve involuntarily retrieved material from memory, represent a large portion of our everyday time. Remembering in everyday life generally occurs in the context of many other processes such as perceiving, planning, thinking, deciding and acting. Very rarely does it occur in isolation. Hence the paths to one’s past will normally be opened while one is travelling concurrently along other mental paths leading to other goals (Alba, J.W., and Hasher, L. 1983).

Intentional remembering may sometimes be an effortful and laborious process. Fortunately, there are pieces of information that we can access almost without effort, particularly when the information has been well rehearsed. In that case the phenomenological experience is similar to that of directly accessing the solicited information. Such direct accessing is an economic and efficient way of retrieving memories. Quickly accessed information is also quite likely to be correct.

References

1. Alba, J.W., and Hasher, L. (1983). Is memory schematic? Psychological Bulletin, 93, 203–231.
2. Berntsen, D. (1998). Voluntary and involuntary access to memory. Memory, 6, 113–141.
3. Bousfield, W.A., and Rosner, S.R. (1970). Free vs. uninhibited recall. Psychonomic Science, 20, 75–76.
4. Burke, D.M., MacKay, D.G., Worthley, J.S., and Wade, E. (1991). On the tip of the tongue: What causes word finding failures in young and older adults? Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 542–579.
5. Goldsmith, M., and Koriat, A. (1999). The strategic regulation of memory reporting: Mechanisms and performance consequences. In D. Gopher and A. Koriat (Eds.), Attention and performance XVII: Cognitive regulation of performance: Interaction of theory and application (pp. 373–400). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
6. Spence, D.P. (1988). Passive remembering. In U. Neisser and E. Winograd (Eds.), Remembering reconsidered. Ecological and traditional approaches to the study of memory (pp. 311–122). New York: Cambridge University Press
7. Tulving, E., and Donaldson, W. (1972). Organization of memory. London: Academic Press.
8. Wegner, D.M., Schneider, D.J., Carter, S.R., and White, T.L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 5–13.
9. Jones, G.V. (1989). Back to Woodworth: Role of interlopers in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Memory and Cognition, 17, 69–76.
10. Kvavilashvili, L., and Mandler, G. (2004). Out of one’s mind: A study of involuntary semantic memories. Cognitive Psychology, 48, 47–94.
11. Goldstein, and Fortgang, (1970) Out of one’s mind: A study of involuntary semantic memories. Cognitive Psychology, 48, 47-94.
12. Berntsen, Staugaard and Sørensen, (2012) Involuntary memory: Concept and theory. In J. H. Mace (Ed.), Involuntary memory (pp. 1-19). Malden, USA: Blackwell Publishing.
13. Neisser, R (1967) Categoric and extended autobiographical memories. In M. A. Conway, D. C. Rubin, H. Spinnler, & W. A. Wagenaar (Eds.), Theoretical perspectives on autobiographical memory (pp. 391-410). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
14. Berntsen, H (1996) A content analysis of involuntary autobiographical memories: Examining the positivity effect in old age. Memory, 17, 161-175.