Autobiographical Interview
A structured research interview developed by Levine and colleagues in 2002 that separates episodic from semantic detail in a person’s recall of their own life. The main objective tool for documenting SDAM.
Participants are asked to recall specific personal events — a holiday, a conversation, a day at school. Their responses are transcribed and scored by trained raters into two categories: "internal" details (episodic: specific sights, sounds, emotions, people, places, times belonging to that event) and "external" details (semantic: general facts, context, background knowledge about the topic of the event).
The method matters because it produces a quantitative measurement that does not depend on self-report. It is the tool behind the Palombo 2015 paper that named SDAM — the three participants produced far fewer internal details than controls while producing normal or above-normal external details. The signature has held up across the subsequent decade of SDAM research.
The Autobiographical Interview and the SAM (a self-report questionnaire) are complementary: the SAM is how a researcher screens for SDAM at scale; the Autobiographical Interview is how the finding is documented in depth.