Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive scientists have discovered much about the acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval of episodic memories; how-ever, much less is known about how memories of our daily experiences are organized, nor how this organization maychange as memories become consolidated. Here, we apply computational network science methodologies to quantify theorganization of recent (within the past year) and remote (5 10 years ago) autobiographical memories and quantitativelyexamine how these networks change over time. We found that remote memories exhibited higher global connectivityrelative to recent memories, and that this increased connectivity is coupled with lower subjective ratings of vividness. Ourresults demonstrate how such cognitive features of episodic memory can be quantitatively examined and shed novel lighton the organization and reconfiguration of episodic memories over time.