What Is Your Earliest Memory Cognition Discussion Questions
What Is Your Earliest Memory Cognition Discussion Questions
The age of earliest memory is only one component of the definition of childhood amnesia. The second component is that from the ages of 4 to 8 years, the number of memories that adults are able to retrieve is smaller than the number expected based on forgetting alone (see Bauer, 2015, for a review). Normal forgetting is a linear function of the time since experience of an event. Among adults, however, there is an under-representation of memories from ages 3 to 7 years. The strongest evidence of this under representation is from studies employing the cue-word technique: Respondents are asked to provide a memory related to each of a number of cue words (e.g., ice-cream), and to estimate how old they were at the time of the event. From these data researchers have created distributions of memories over the first decade of life. Both components of childhood amnesia are clearly apparent in the sample distribution illustrated in Fig. 1. Respondents report few memories from the period before age 3–4 years. The number of memories reported increases gradually from 4–8 years, at which time a steeper, more adult-like distribution is observed (e.g., Pillemer and White, 1989). This pattern is quite robust among adults. It is observed regardless of the method used to elicit the memories and the age of the respondents at the time the memories are cued (i.e., whether at 20 or at 70 years; Rubin and Schulkind, 1997).
Research on adults’ autobiographical memory has identified two general classes of agentic and communal content with respect to early memories, memories of turning points, and memories of peak experiences (McAdams, Hoffman, Mansfield, & Day, 1996). Agentic content covered topics of self-mastery, status, achievement/responsibility, and empowerment. Communal content covered themes of love/friendship, dialog, care/help, and community. Participants high in power or achievement motivation reported more agentic content, and participants high in affiliation motivation reported more communal content. Not only adults but also children at the age of 4–7 years revealed the two themes of agency (being brave) and communion (being nice) in their autobiographical narratives (Ely, Mezli, Hadge, & McCabe, 1998).
As the content of self-narrations is predictably related to a person’s dominant motives, and as the latter strongly influence attention, memory, and interpretation of ongoing events (Woike & Bender, 2009), the themes of agency and communion provide coherence and continuity to a person’s past, current experience, and future goals. Persons who construe themselves as agentic (e.g., rate their agentic traits as high) experience their agentic memories as subjectively more recent than their communal memories. Similarly, persons who construe themselves as communal (high ratings on communal traits) experience their communal memories as subjectively more recent than agentic ones. This “semantic congruence” between the subjective importance of agency or communion and the perceived temporal closeness of memories in that domain was shown by Gebauer, Haddock, Broemer, and von Hecker (2013). It explains why some past experiences can feel much closer in time than they really are (independently of mood congruence and self-enhancement strivings). It also explains the self-perpetuating nature of agency and communion in self-construal because temporally recent memories exert more influence on current interpretations and goal pursuit than temporally more distant memories (Peetz & Wilson, 2008).
As evidenced by the discussion of resource theory earlier, memory researchers are combining the methodologies of experimental cognitive psychology with the correlational techniques of individual difference research. Correlational techniques of regression, path analysis, and causal modeling are being used to determine what mechanisms are responsible for age-related variance in memory performance. The research so far has been consistent in pointing out the importance of perceptual speed and working memory as important factors in producing differences in memory performance.
These statistical techniques are not new; they have been used by individual difference researchers for a long time. What is new, however, is the use of the techniques to test hypotheses that have been developed in the experimental cognitive psychology laboratory. This combination of research traditions brings new promise to the study of aging and memory.
