Our research

Center on Autobiographical Memory Research [CON AMORE] is a Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation for the period of 2010-2019 to study autobiographical memory, that is the ability to consciously remember the personal past.

We view autobiographical memory as a neurocognitive (brain/mind) system for consciously recollecting events in the personal past, by combining and extending more basic systems in constructing mental representations of personal events. Evolutionarily, autobiographical memory is central for the ability to participate in complex social systems. Simple (associative) forms of autobiographical remembering are hypothesized to also operate in non-human animals, counter to dominant views.

Our goal is to develop a new and unified understanding of autobiographical memory, which integrates research from disparate fields and which places autobiographical memory in a greater interdisciplinary context with the goal of specifying its characteristics in healthy cognition, its dysfunctional qualities in specific mental disorders, its development across the life span and its operations in non-human primates.

The empirical part of our research is structured along these areas:

MAIN AREA 1

Basic mechanisms and characteristics of involuntary (versus voluntary) autobiographical memories

MAIN AREA 2

Life span development of autobiographical memory, from childhood to old age

MAIN AREA 3

Involuntary memories of past events in non-human animals

MAIN AREA 4

Key structures in the organization of autobiographical knowledge, and the intersection between culture and autobiographical memory

MAIN AREA 5

Autobiographical memory in mental disorders