Autobiographical memory for childhood events: patterns of recall in psychiatric patients with a history of alleged trauma.

Social scientists are currently being pressed upon by the legal and scientific communities to provide more definitive explanations regarding the nature and functions of memory (Loftus 1993). At the forefront of this debate is autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memory is a subclassification of memory within the declarative memory system and signifies memory for one's own personal life experiences in the recent and/or remote past. This study investigates the relationship between early trauma and memory for childhood events in adult psychiatric patients. The findings suggest that patients with an alleged history of trauma have a measurably different pattern of recall for early events than the patient and nonpatient comparison groups.