 This study is important because it shows the longevity of autobiographical memory even when there are global memory failures in other ways and gives an idea of how psychology's results can be used to enrich the lives of the elderly and ill.

Hyman was also interested in the transference of laboratory methods of testing autobiographical information to real life situations, and in 1998 Ira Hyman along with Carol Wilkinson published an article that looked at how memory had been tested in psychology laboratories.They hypothesized that the methods psychology researcher were using, mainly word lists, did not explain how normal autobiographical memory worked, and the results gathered using this type of research may not generalize to real world situations.They found that errors made in autobiographical memories did not relate to the complexity of an additional task, that called for the participant to remember word lists.