Reminiscence therapy (RT) for older adults has been shown to provide significant psychological and cognitive benefits for those who participate, but typically the content of these reminiscences is not recorded and therefore lost. For this project, semi-structured reminiscence interviews will directly probe memories from early life, childhood and adolescence in a group already engaged in RT, with these interviews recorded and archived. The content of archived reminiscences will be analysed by our interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists, historians, geographers, ethnographers and memory studies experts in order to explore the nature and construction of “cultural memory”, and to trace the transition from autobiographical to semantic memory.