Karlsson, K. 1 , Sikström, S. 2 & Willander, J. 1, 3
1 Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
2 Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
3 Department of Psychology, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
The semantic content is central in autobiographical memories. In the present study we investigated the retrieval of event information by addressing the semantic representation of events. For the purpose of the present study we adopted Latent Semantic Analysis. In the experiment participants were presented with unimodal (i.e., one modality) or multimodal (i.e., three modalities in conjunction) retrieval cues and asked to retrieve autobiographical events. The events were verbally described and transcribed to text. The Latent Semantic Analysis indicated that the semantic representation (i.e., the meaning) of visually evoked memories were most similar to the multimodally evoked memories, whereas auditorily and olfactorily evoked memories were less similar to the multimodally evoked events. We conclude that retrieval using multimodal retrieval cues is dominated by visual information.