Strategic Remembering and Memory in Adults
Most of the time, we do not set out to remember the everyday events of our lives. Yet many times a day, we are called upon to remember them. When we know in advance that we must not forget, we can marshall powerful techniques or strategies to make certain that our memories serve us. In our lab we are examining the development of strategic remembering in young children. We are especially interested in the role of socialization in the ability to remember strategically. We have found that differences in maternal support during a strategic memory task are related to how much children remember. We are currently examining relations between children’s strategic memory, their understanding of the process of remembering (metamemory skills), and their skills at autobiographical reminiscing.
Although the majority of the work in our lab focuses on early developments in memory, we also work with adults. We are interested in differences in adults’ reports of early and later memories and in individual differences in reporting earliest memories. We are also interested in how women and men differ in their reports about the past and in the specific characteristics of especially significant events, such as the birth of a child or the first day of kindergarten. Our eventual goal is to fill in the empty space between our studies of children’s memory and adults’ memory to create an integrated picture of remembering and forgetting from infancy to adulthood.