Personal possessions as cues for autobiographical remembering

An encounter with personal possessions in everyday life, such as souvenirs, jewellery, or digital photos, may bring the past back to mind. Sometimes this is a brief and fleeting memory, other times it brings back vivid memories and emotional responses. Through three qualitative studies, this PhD research investigated personal possessions as cues: The responses personal possessions evoke (called cued responses), how the item-memories relationship evolves, and what characteristics of possessions facilitate cued remembering. An understanding of this process could facilitate the design of personal possessions or systems for cuing memories, for example in the field of human-computer interaction. The findings in this thesis showed the dynamic nature of the item-memories relationship, and the ways in which cuing can be facilitated or hampered.