In the article “Culture and Language in the Emergence of Autobiographical Memory” by Robyn Fivush and Katherine Nelson, autobiographical memory and how it forms is discussed through the emergence of language, understanding of self, culture and gender. These authors propose that instead of childhood amnesia being a “barrier” that must be overcome in order to begin creating a “life story”, autobiographical memory is accumulated through socio-cultural development. It is stated that adults can recall memories at the earliest ages of three or four, because the density and level of detail of memories has developed within the child. However, the age can vary among different individuals. I can remember being two years old, and not only tidbits here and there, but a framework and a self awareness that I can still access in my memory today. I can remember floor plans of the many houses we lived in in great detail. Also people such as family members, neighbors, babysitters and friends. In the article, it is stated that adults can recall some details about events as early as the age of two, but it is argued that the child isnt able to effectively tie these memories together unless they are specifically targeted. I disagree with this statement, because I feel I can remember what I was thinking at the time and how I felt. I can recall a framework of daily life, and remember specific events that my parents did not tell me about, or that they didn’t even know in the first place (such as when I was doing something I shouldn’t have been).
I always thought that everyone else could remember the same things that I could, but that is not the case. My little sister, who is two years younger than me, cannot remember anything before the age of seven or eight. What could possibly account for the large range in age of rememberance? Fivush and Nelson claim that gender and culture are factors in the development of memory, but we are both female and raised by the same parents. The memories that she does have from childhood are memories that my parents and myself have created for her. I can remember telling her stories when we were younger about events in our lives, and when we were older, she would talk about these events using the exact same language that I had used when explaining them to her as a child. However, I know she didn’t explicitly remember these events, because she could not further describe them or give any other contextual details except for the things she was told. This might be explained by the presence of a “linguistic scaffold” that my parents and I created for her to help her organize events. Reminiscing about the past can help a child develop the ability to recall events and put them into an organized framework. I found it interesting that the ariticle described an experiment performed by Simcock and Hayne in 2002 that shows the emergence of this phenomenon. They had two and three year old children engaging in activities and then at the intervalls of six and twelve months later, they measured the level of recalled information and what the children could actually recall correctly. They found that the children could provide verbal recall, but all the words they used were words that they had in their vocabulary at the time. This shows that language is an important part of memory recall, because a person must have language to be able to describe an event.
Another point brought up in the article is that a child must be aware of themselves and others who also experience the same events. My sister disagrees with me about events that happened when we were children, but since I am older, I believe that my memory representations are more true to the situation than hers. The disagreements between the recall of the younger sibling versus the older sibling challenged her to understand that memories are just representations that are unique to each person. They depend on the child’s level of development, their persepctive of the situation, and past experiences that may be applied to help shape the memory.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
An interesting topic we discussed in class concerning child memory was childhood abuse. This subject parallels another class I am taking called Psychology of Trauma. The main question at hand is whether or not a child is telling the truth about abuse they have encountered. On the one hand you want to believe that the child is telling the truth because of a want to protect the child. On the other hand, you do not want to blame someone for something they have not done. We discussed several ways in which we can tell whether or not a child's eyewitness testimony is true or fabricated.
One issue that comes to mind is questioning children under the age of 3. Most of us cannot make a memory before the age of 3. This brings into question whether or not children under three can remember things that happened weeks or months previously. Some evidence suggests that infants as young as 2 months old can retain memories for at least a couple of days (Rovee-Collier). Yet this is only evidence of implicit memories. Bauer (1997) examined this problem by showing young toddlers a series of actions and seeing if they could copy them. Older toddlers could remember the sequence of actions up to a year later. This suggests that even if babies younger than 3 cannot consolidate short-term memories into solid long-term memories, they do have concrete knowledge of past events. This suggests that children under 3 can remember past abuse.
Another issue concerning childhood abuse is the language barrier between young children and adults. One attempt to break this barrier was to give children with limited language capabilities anatomically correct dolls. The problem with this, however, is the dual representation hypothesis. Children under three have trouble with symbolic representations because it requires them to hold two sources of information in their head at once. This attempt could lead to false allegations simply because the child is unable correctly complete a symbolic task the interviewer is asking of the child.
Another issue is the problem with suggestibility. Memories can blend together and knowledge from other sources fills in the gaps. An example of suggestibility is when your parents tell you a story about when you were younger that you initially do not remember, you begin to beleive and remember it more and more as your parents tell it to you several more times. Suggestability plays a large role in abuse cases because of the fear that a therapist or interviewer has used suggestablilty to alter the child's memory.
While there are some cases of false child abuse I feel as though most of them are not. The reason I feel this is because I do not beleive a child would come forward and say such an accusation about a loved one unless it was really true. It is unlikely that a child would construe a memory like abuse out of the blue with no basis of fact.
Post a Comment