01174576 DISCUSS HOW THE MAJOR THEORIES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY DEVELOPMENT CAN BE COMBINED TO BEST EXPLAIN THE PHENOMENON OF CHILDHOOD AMNESIA
A developmental synthesis of the extant and prominent theories of Memory, specifically the emergence of Autobiographical Memory compliments and reinforces several accounts of Childhood Amnesia and has been shown to help explain the universal `accelerated forgetting`, that is now well established within the scientific community. In order to explore this claim one must first define the terminology and proceed to provide evidence from some of the studies in the field that have contributed to the proposed theoretical synergy. According to the Social Cultural Developmental Theory, autobiographical memory (AbM) is: “…fundamentally distinctive form of memory that emerges across the preschool years that involves basic memory abilities, as well as a developing understanding of temporal relations, narrative, self and others, and mental states…memory of the self in the past is embedded within a social cultural milieu in which particular forms and contents of experience are valued and shared”. (Nelson & Fivush, 2004). AbM is unique and distinct from other types of memory (M) such as Episodic M (EM), which is M for a specific experience from the past, situated in a definite time and space, or Semantic M (SM), which is organised in terms of networks, categories, schemas and scripts of general knowledge systems (Tulving, 1972). AbM is also distinct from Generic Event M (GEM), which Linton (1982) claims is always dependent on the accumulation of EM, and provides a schema, derived from experience, that sketches the general outline of an event without providing details of the specific time or place, i.e., Tulving’s ‘Script’.
Neisser ‘s ‘Ecological Approach’, which is essentially a Cognitive Discontinuity/Reconstructive account to AbM, goes beyond a partially reconstructive Copy Theory of M and places the emergence of schema as a speculative condition for reconstructing personal M (PM) into an AbM system related to the self; assuming that the beginnings of construction in M are provided by the nested structure of reality: that molar events are perceived just as directly as the molecular events that make them up and that molar traces survive longer than their molecular constituents (Neisser, 1986). Both Linton (1975) and Smith (1952) equated poor recall for PM related to repetitive or trivial events, and there is a some research into the role of ‘uniqueness’, ‘emotion‘ (White, 1982) and ‘consequentiality’, ‘unexpectedness‘ (Rubin & Kozin, 1984) in the recall of PM, suggesting that single exposures are more likely to be incorporated into the AbM system than multiple exposures which seem to lead to GEM. For Neisser, AbM, is highly organised, vast, and represents the sum of peoples’ knowledge of their whole life, forming the basis for their concept of self. Brewer (1986) defined AbM in terms of its relation to the self, stating that the EM/SM distinction “…blurs the line between personally relevant and impersonal knowledge..” and M. He divided AbM into: 1) 2) 3) 4)
Single Personal M Generic Personal M Autobiographical facts Self-Schema
Aside from the clear Piagetian emphasis of schema operations, this definition is congruent with Nelson’s, essentially Sociolinguistic hypothesis, that single or generic personal M comes to be organised into a complex knowledge system: the Self-Schema (SS) through parental scaffolding and reinstatement. Within this developmental analysis, the distinction between lasting AbM that bear on the SS and what Nelson calls ‘ephemeral personal memories’ is crucial. More recent research
has demonstrated a difference in M for the self and M for the other, with a clear primacy towards M for social self and other in AbM (Wang, 2001/2006; Nelson & Fivush, 2004). Despite the overabundance of different theoretical approaches to the categorisation and classification of M, it is possibly to view all M as a functional system, that has, inherent to it, an adaptive, evolutionary value, enabling the organism to undertake goaldirected actions within specific but varying environments, increasingly with development (Oakley, 1983). This Functional M System (FMS), accounts for the retention of information about frequent/routine events, and the process of discarding information about unrepeated events; the assumption is that we integrate new information about variation in recurrent events only, into a general knowledge system. Within an FMS, EM becomes part of a Generic M System (GMS); new experience primes the organism for a new schema, which functions primarily as an EM, but with further experience of similar events, functions increasingly as a script (Fivush, 1984; Linton, 1982). The reconstructive/narrative idea of reinstatement is introduced, as a post learning exposure to some part of the experience, which doubles the amount of time M is retained (Nelson, 1993b)). Reinstatement has an important part to play in explaining the evolution of AbM from the FMS, and leads us towards Vygotsky’s (1978) Internalisation Model and wider Social Interaction Hypotheses of AbM. Attending to the social function of AbM and the role of language in the establishment of AbM, Nelson (1993b) argues that the original functional significance of AbM is that of sharing with others; something that language facilitates. Social Interaction and Sociolinguistic accounts of AbM assume that the child takes over forms of adult thought through transactions with adults in contexts where those forms are employed and M is pooled and produced. These complexities promote a durable affinity to a range of explanations, the successes which are dependent upon the assets of the theoretical framework employed, hence a
Multicomponent Dynamic Developmental Perspective contributes by extending the roots of AbM research into the development of Individuals in a society in flux (Nelson & Fivush, 2004). Freud and Breur (1893/1974) in their ‘Studies in Hysteria’ proposed a central role of AbM in the genesis, maintenance and treatment of neurosis, emphasising the role of emotion and the effect of the M on subsequent personality development. Psychodynamic theory is also a natural starting point for our discussion of childhood amnesia (CA.) White and Pillemar (1979) noticed an ‘evident shift in memory functioning reflected in the phenomenon of childhood amnesia’, when adults could not consciously access M from before the age of 3 or 4, even though many were retrieved from later childhood. Freud (1963) implies that something was there and is lost and he lead the search to explain this loss in terms of some force that interferes with retrieval of M that still exists. “A memory usually cannot be retrieved at all in the case of one particular group of extremely important experiences, namely those occurring at a very early stage of childhood that are experienced at the time without understanding, but are then subsequently understood and interpreted…the patient does not remember anything at all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out…reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it without of course being aware of the fact…” (Freud, 1914) Bearing in mind that he made these observations nearly 100 years ago, we at least get a sense of why probing this issue of Infantile Amnesia or ‘Kindheitamnesie’ (which for Freud was an amnesia concerning childhood as opposed to what we assume to be an amnesia during childhood) is so crucial. Of course there is little supporting evidence for his later account of repression of Oedipal memories and their replacement with less threatening screen memories, indeed, almost all research departs from psychodynamic theory and intends to account for this
phenomenon in a myriad of alternative ways, but there is one piece of evidence that suggests perhaps the original impetus for studying this mysterious and universal occurrence was correct and therefore provides a useful meta context of self knowledge and re-emergence through which to integrate the various theories of AbM and CA. Kihlstrom and Harackiewicz (1982) attempted to relate screen memories with personality factors by giving high school and college students questionnaires assessing their ‘harmavoidance’ amongst other indices of neuroticism and asking about their earliest memories. They found the usual distribution of M across early years and created a scoring system for categorising ‘Screen Memories’ or ‘Not’. Their principle finding was that young people with high scores on harmavoidance more reliably had screen memories than those with low scores. These results do suggest people with screen memories carry fear and anxiety, which are well known to be indicative of proneness to psychopathology, and support the psychodynamic conception that CA involves screen memories for repressed traumatic ones. It is hard to dismiss the robust corpus of research supporting the existence of CA. Colegrove (1899) found very few early memories in a cohort of over 1,500 people. Smith (1952) systematically recalled over 6,000 of her own memories from ages 2-61, noting a sharp decline in recall from the age of 6 back to birth. Waldfogel (1948) pioneered the study of recall of events from ages 1-7, and found there were very few memories at first, with more coming from later years, leading him to reflect that CA reflects the emergence of intelligence and linguistic capacity, comparing the CA curve to the curve of IQ and Language. Crovitz & Harvey (1979) found similar results with college undergraduates, defining the CA period from 0-3 and noting increased recall from the ages of 6-7. In a follow up with Mckee (1980), cues were found to increase recall if they were frequently used in an earlier memory study, but both frequently used and infrequent cues produced the same distribution of M across age, with very few from early infancy and more coming later. These
researchers established that there is amnesia for the earliest years, that CA is far from complete (Newcombe et al., 1994) and qualitatively different from the retrograde amnesia we find in brain injured patients (Conway, 1990). Rubin (1986) mapped the distribution of AbM over the lifespan in his study of the macrostructure of AbM, showing the CA component at the far left of a non-monotonic curve, with little recall before the age of 5. According to Rubin’s findings CA may be nothing more than an ‘asymptote’ of the retention curve and fully accounted for by the Rubin Retention Function. Wetzler and Sweeney (1986) tested Rubin’s ‘retention function’ and found that it did not account for the distribution of M from the earliest years, and that the distribution of M from 0-5 years was characterised by an Accelerated Forgetting Function. Both Rubin and her critics come from a Cognitive Discontinuity viewpoint, as do the next group of theorists. Piaget and Inhelder (1973) propose that infants have not developed the appropriate schema for sequencing events and so cannot encode event knowledge effectively. Schachtel (1947); Neisser (1962); White and Pillemar (1979) argue that developmental changes in stored knowledge, short-term processing and retrieval strategies all directly affect encoding, integration and retrieval. However, Nelson et al., (1983), Nelson (1986/88) and Fivush (1984) have found that children under the age of 3 have both knowledge of events in general and M for specific events, they also found that children from the ages of 3-8 can produce detailed accounts of events such as birthday parties and are able to design their narrative to suit the listener. It is here that we depart from Cognitive Discontinuity as a comprehensive theory of AbM, as it clearly does not account for the persistence of some AbM within the CA period. Nelson & Gruendel (1981) believe that children need to build up a background of general event knowledge before episodes can be recognised as novel and worth remembering, suggesting that early on in infancy, everything is novel and therefore nothing is
memorable. A similar attempt to account for CA, is that EM emerges around the age of 4 years as a function of the emergence of a meta-representational level of cognitive functioning, and that prior to this age, children simply update their general knowledge systems as new information is encountered and experienced (Gopnik & Graf, 1988; Perner, 1991). However, Fivush & Hudson, (1990) established that infants do have specific EM and can remember them for extensive periods prior to the age of the earliest AbM reported by adults. In addition, Nelson and Ross (1980) found 2 year-old children evidencing specific M for events and experiences occurring 6 months earlier, and that by the age of 4 they remembered some events that happened as much as 2 years before. So it seems that M in the amnesia period does exist and is retained for extensive periods of time, suggesting a certain level of continuity as opposed to the purely discontinuous process assumed previously. M from the CA period may have been shown to exist, albeit subconsciously, in students looking at pictures of old class mates from preschool (Newcombe & Fox‌1994); using physiological measurements, recognition was detected although verbalisations of recall were rare. The child’s initial functional system is pragmatic and categorical: a GMS, but in order for the emergence of AbM, the child must learn to narrate truthfully, specifically and to elaborate which transcends the goals of the generic system and involves cognitive-linguistic development. Thus, sharing in a social context appears necessary for the establishment of AbM and Vygotsky (1978) comes in here, expressing how overt recounting evolves into covert recounting, allowing for language to assume a reinstating role. His Internalisation Model conveniently corresponds to the approximate age of offset of CA, with the development of more sophisticated language and narrative skills. Brewer (1986) warns us not to conceive of AbM in itself as verbal, that much more imagery is reported for AbM, but AbM can be re-organised and reformulated in verbal narrative terms. Overwhelmingly, the evidence agrees that there are various
developmental reasons why we find it difficult to remember events before the age of 4 years old, as adults, and that primitive forms of AbM exist within the amnesia period. It is also clear that M is formed and in some cases maintained, albeit inaccessibly, from the CA period. Cognition, language and the emergence of self are strong components of the developmental leap out of CA and it is through transactions that children learn to organise and narrate their experiences into an AbM system, thus assuming more adult forms of remembering. Nelson’s work highlights the social function of M, in that it underlies all of our storytelling, history making and narrative activities, ultimately serving all our accumulated knowledge systems. This transactional viewpoint restates that children learn to engage in talk about the past, initially from parents (as in Vygotskian scaffolding) who construct narratives around the information contributed by the child. The timing of this learning is also consistent with the onset of AbM. Fivush and Hammond (1990) found that at 2-3 years children were relatively uninterested in talking about experiences but that at 4 years they were both interested and capable. They found that the variability in the age of onset of AbM related to intelligence, linguistic ability and gender. Research into these individual differences has illuminated the field quite radically. Wang (2001/2006) found that the first M of North American and European adults was reported on average 6 months earlier than adults from China, Korea or Taiwan, highlighting some of the important qualitative differences in content whereby westerners tended to recall individualistic and non-westerners focussed more on collective activities. Adults from New Zealand (Maoris) however, remembered early M as much as 10 months before their Caucasian counterparts, with the earliest being just over 2 years old (MacDonald et al., 2000). The onset and offset of CA intersects here with predominantly socio-cultural linguistic account of onset of AbM and illustrates why the integrative approach is necessary to fully understand the phenomena, for it is not purely cognitive change, nor merely transactions and not
only emergent self that leads to the development of AbM and consequently the end of the CA period, but a combination of all three, and potentially more individual factors that best describes and accounts for such development. Several researchers have established a narrative account of AbM, looking at the positive effects of elaborative as opposed to paradigmatic M talk, that fits within a functional memory system and combines sociolinguistic and social interaction hypotheses to account for the individual differences found across cultures and gender in the emergence of the self: Ratner, (1984) found that children with mothers who ask more M eliciting questions performed better on M tasks at ages 3 and 4, such that the mother’s M questions provided reliable cues for M search. Tessler, (1986) studied children’s recall of objects in his famous British Museum study and found that children never remembered items that had not been spoken about with the mothers. Finally Engles (1986) provides a theoretical paradigm through which to view either Elaborative or Pragmatic parental M-talk style. Mother and child, then, clearly reconstruct their experiences together in narrative form and this establishes narratives as effective strategies for M storage and retrieval, which is evidenced by the universality of narrative thinking across cultures and would seem to support not just cultural transmission or socialisation, but rather a dialectical, Vygotskian model (Hudson, 1990); emphasising transactions and decentering which also applies to the meta-representational change suggested by Perner (1991). This functional claim, that sharing M with others serves a significant socio-cultural purpose – the acquisition of which means the child can enter into social and cultural histories of the family and community, does not, in itself explain the offset of CA but when the language component of this dynamic body of research is taken into account, it becomes clear that language as a means for reinstatement is not immediately available even when conversational exchanges begin around remembering: that reinstatement through language requires a certain level of language faculty and especially the ability to use
verbal representations of others to set up personal representations within a M system (Nelson, 1993b). So it would follow, logically, that as adults, using such complex systems to remember and represent, we would not be able to access M from before the time we began encoding in such a way, therefore, relegating M from the early infancy period to a place inaccessible with our current methods of retrieval. Not lost, but perhaps founded in our unconscious processes, if we infer from the psychodynamic perspective. In conclusion, under a General Developmental Model, which is an integrative, multicomponent dynamic account of the sociocultural emergence of AbM at a certain point in childhood, when the social conditions foster it and the representational system facilitating linguistic reinstatement is developed sufficiently for the mediation of social sharing, implementation of narrative, and categorical/thematic organisation of M and assumes that M from before this qualitatively separate stage in development will be forgotten as in the Wetzler/Sweeney (1986) Accelerated Forgetting Function. Wang’s cross-cultural research indicates that personal self arises after social self, implying that EM and AbM for the social self can be laid down before personal EM and AbM. Scratching the surface of the extant and varied theories of AbM has shown some clear cross over into the accounts of CA. Complementary and sometimes conflicting evidence has led to a pluralist understanding that shared early narratives stabilise and structure the AbM system (Sutton, 2002). CA seems well established but still Psychoanalysis offers the most comprehensive understanding of why it is important to study. Research, spanning a century of scientific investigation has been mentioned to make the case that only through combining and adhering to all avenues of questioning, do we come to a lucid appreciation of the totality of such basic and uniquely human functions and processes, as we have seen with AbM and CA.
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