Verbal skills and imagistic resources in the narrative coherence of autobiographical events

Abstract

The quality of an autobiographical narrative seems to depend on both verbal skills (style and coherence) and imagistic resources. However, the impact of cognitive verbal and/or visual styles on the evocation of memories that produce the narrative is still unclear. A total of 82 college students from different fields (Psychology, Languages, Biomedicine and Dentistry), aged between 17 and 54 years old (mean = 22.66 years, SD = 6.2) wrote an autobiographical event and answered to three questionnaires: autobiographical memory, verbalizer-visualizer, and imagination. The results did not indicate the presence of visual cues in the autobiographical narrative, but showed differences between two groups of students (Psychology and Language versus Dentistry and Biomedicine) for verbal style, number of words and narrative coherence. The interaction among these three variables was supported by both the correlation between narrative coherence and number of words (r = 0.769, p = 0.001), and by the narrative profiles among college groups.