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Graduate Student Award Winner 

Stability and Change in Autobiographical Memory Narratives

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 1 - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm PST, Salon ABC.

Victoria Wardell¹ (), Jason Bao², Sabrina Co¹, Kimberly Marty¹, Khushi Sharma¹, Daniela Palombo¹; ¹University of British Columbia, ²Claremont Mckenna College

Humans have a proclivity for storytelling. Some of the most common stories we tell are our autobiographical memories, the stories we have for our own lived experience. Memory is a remarkably malleable system though: we forget and even embellish our stories of the past over time. Here, we examine the dynamic interplay of stability and transformation in narrative recall. In two large datasets, we use standardized human coding and natural language processing to show that what we narrate changes substantially over time. We further demonstrate that the emotionality of the event offers memory some preservation, with negative events showing greater consistency than neutral events. We then demonstrate that the way we narrative our past is remarkably consistent. We plot the trajectory of mnemonic details across memory narratives to show that memory narratives reliably begin with contextual details, progressing with details of the event itself that then taper off towards a coda of emotional reflections. Crucially, even differences in emotionality of the event do not erode the structure of story that anchors recall. This duality—malleable content within a stable form—suggests that memory is both adaptive and constrained. Flexibility in what we recall may allow us to tailor our memories to different audiences while stability in how we recall may encourage conformity to culturally shared storytelling norms. The marrying of malleable content and stable structure may be crucial for memory to facilitate social connection and meaning-making.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic