Abstract
One of the main aims of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on autobiographical memory was to provide researchers with an opportunity to ‘stick their necks out’ and throw open for public scrutiny theoretical claims they might otherwise have kept to themselves. In the papers collected in the present volume the reader will find that this is just what occurs. Even where an author has chosen to present new empirical findings these are accompanied by the type of theoretical speculation often edited out in, for example, journal submissions. Thus, the intention of the book, like the workshop, is to provide an impetus to the development of theory in autobiographical memory research.