Transition Theory: A Minimalist Perspective on the Organization of Autobiographical Memory

Our lives are boring, or at least repetitive. Oddly enough, this basic fact has been ignored by researchers interested in autobiographical memory. In this article, I summarize a theory, Transition Theory (T-2), developed in response to this situation; I also review a project, the Living-in-History project, which motivated it. In brief, the Living-in-History project demonstrates that public events occasionally play an important role in how people think about their lives. However, this happens only where (and when) these events produce a fundamental and enduring change in the fabric of daily life. T-2 provides a psychologically tractable formulation for this metaphor. On this view, the "threads" that constitute the fabric of daily life correspond to mental representations that capture our knowledge of repeatedly encountered people, places, and things and recurring activities. During stable times, these representations are "woven" together by basic associative processes and come to form lifetime periods (i.e., "my college years," "when I was living in New York," etc.). These period representations are separated (delineated) by major life transitions. Transitions are events like relocation or the birth of a child which "change everything." Follow along with the fabric metaphor, transitional events replace one set of threads (i.e., the frequently encountered, material features of everyday life) with another, and do so in a rapid, exhaustive, and synchronized manner. Thus, T-2 contends that autobiographical memory is structured by important life transitions and that major transitions play an important role in organizing memories, regardless of whether they are individual (e.g., immigration) or collective (e.g., war) in nature.