CON AMORE - Center on Autobiographical Memory Research

Center on Autobiographical Memory Research [CON AMORE] was a Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) for the period of 2010-2019 to study autobiographical memory. After the generous grant from the DNRF was terminated, we have continued our research and center activities on the basis of other funding sources. Our interests still center on the same overall theme of autobiographical memory.
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.
We aim to develop an understanding of autobiographical memory that integrates research from disparate fields and places it 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 how it may differ across cultures.

We pursue these questions through interrelated research projects. We examine mental time travel when it is involuntary – that is, it takes place with no executive control. We study cultural-cognitive structures in the organization of subjective time. We study the development of autobiographical memory in infancy and childhood. We extend our research on autobiographical memory in healthy individuals to account for dysfunctional effects in prominent clinical disorders, notably depression and anxiety, and impaired autobiographical memory in dementia. Recently we have become interested in expanding our research to the fields of eyewitness testimony, consumer behavior, as well as moral psychology.