Autobiographical Memory
How long is that tale of your memory? What do you remember about your early childhood? The course of development of the ability to remember personally meaningful events is a long and winding one. Almost as soon as they can talk, children tell us that they have personal or autobiographical memories. Yet over the course of early to middle childhood, autobiographical memory changes dramatically. We use a number of methods and approaches to find out why.
One of the ways that we study the development of the ability to recall personally meaning events and experiences is by asking children to tell us what they remember about the past. We then examine their autobiographical narratives to characterize their complexity and coherence. In a recently completed longitudinal study, we used this tried-and-true method to track developmental changes in autobiographical narratives and also study the “fates” of memories across the early and middle childhood years. The study included 4-, 6-, and 8-year old children and adults (see sample narratives below). Each participant in the study shared autobiographical memories with us once a year for 4 years. We are using this rich data base to catalogue the many ways that memory changes over childhood and also when children’s autobiographical memory becomes adult-like. We have already found out that both the number of details and level of complexity in autobiographical memory narratives increased across childhood. In addition, we have found relations between children’s general cognitive abilities, such as speed of processing, source memory, and memory for temporal order, and their memory for life events. We are currently using the tales that the children and adults told us about their lives to track the fates of their memories over the course of the study. We look forward to looking back with our participants and to the lessons about memory and its development that we will learn along the way.
Example of narrative with 4-year old girl:
E: Kathryn, what can you tell me about the dinosaur painting at school?
C: They live at a small school.
E: Yes
C: I made some dinosaurs.
E: You made some dinosaurs.
C: I glued some dinosaurs.
E: You glued them.
E: What else can you tell me about the dinosaur painting you did at school? Anything else?
C: That’s all.
Example of narrative with 8-year old girl:
E: Tell me about what you remember when you got one hundred percent on your sixty word spelling test.
C: I have two, I had two of them and I got- well, um, the first- I got sixty percent because I studied hard, well actually I barely studied, but I got it right somehow. And so my mom and dad when I told them I got a hundred percent right they cheered and they’re like, “Really?” And I’m like, “Really.” And they were concerned that I lied for a minute, but then they…
E: Okay. What else do you remember about this?
C: Mr. Dugas announced it that I didn’t have to take the spelling test. Me and about three other people.
E: Good.
C: I was happy that I was one of them. I didn’t want to take that spelling test again, no way. I never want to take a spelling test again.
E: Okay. Do you remember anything else about this?
C: Um, I remember that when he announced me, other people were like, “Good job Jeni!” And then Patricia came up to me and said, “Jeni, you don’t have to brag about it.” And I was just giving people high-fives, because they got it and she was- said that I was bragging about it. I said, “Patricia, I’m not bragging.”
E: Okay. Anything else?
C: No.
Another way we look back to learn about autobiographical memory and its development is by using cue words to remind children of past events. We ask children to “think of a specific memory involving ice cream,” for example. We also ask them to tell us how old they were at the time of the event. By giving several cue words and plotting the children’s ages at the time of the remembered event, we can see the distribution of memories across childhood. In a recent study, we used this technique to uncover important similarities — and also critical differences — in the distribution of autobiographical memories produced by children and adults. Just like adults, most of the memories that the children generated in response to the cue words were of recent events. But unlike adults, in whom the rate of forgetting stabilizes over time, the distributions of memories produced by the children suggested that their memories remain suseptible to inference and forgetting. This result provides a ready explanation for infantile or childhood amnesia (the relative paucity among adults of memories from the first years of life). It suggests that we experience amnesia for childhood events because in childhood, the rate at which we forget autobiographical experiences is faster than the rate at which we form them. Sometime in childhood, these trends reverse, and adult-like autobiographical memory is born!
The power function provides a best fit for adult data (a); the exponential function best describes children's data (b). |
Still on the presses in the lab are new ways of examining autobiographical memory. For example, we are currently developing ways to use brain imaging techniques to “eavesdrop” on the neural processing of past events. Event-related potentials (ERPs) tell us that there are critical differences in the way the brain responds to events from our own lives ("old-remembered") and novel or “foil” events.
"Old-Remembered" |
"Foil" |