ИСТИНА

The development of mankind challenged human memory with a set of new problems unique in its complexity and impossible to solve by a semantic/episodic dual system. The culture demands that a person should be subjectively responsible for his/her own actions in the distant past and guided by goals addressed to a distant future. This situation results in the need to cultivate a qualitatively different form of memory preceding a manifestation of self-consciousness. Autobiographical memory, being a unique human memory system, provides a scaffold for grounding self-esteem in accessible autobiographical experiences and awareness of personal continuity on a life-long time scale. These functions are future-oriented, with a main focus on constant progress in achieving new goals not attainable in the past and in maintaining social responsibilities extending beyond the current situation. It should be noted that, being phylogenetically new, autobiographical memory is exclusively the product of cultural evolution. We speculated that the optimal strategy for autobiographical memory functioning would be to introduce an inaccuracy to allow for gradual memory enhancement. The more successful a person remembers his/her own past, the more optimistic s/he will be about future self-efficacy, and hence, more challenging goals might be set and achieved. In accord with this assumption, empirical data indicate a clear positive bias in autobiographical memory. We termed this strategy for autobiographical memory functioning positive construction.