This post is for Ben K. Actually, and all the other siblings. Actually, it's for everyone, 'cause we've all experienced this, and no doubt pondered it. Ben K's just the one who always makes fun of me for things that pertain to memory.
In Developmental Psych today, we were learning about the phenomenon of infant amnesia. Okay, everybody, picture your earliest memory. Who knows if it's actually real or not. <--not an actual question. How old do you think you were? According to developmentalists, our first genuine memories typically occur between the ages of 3 and 4. Some people only have their first memories a little after the age of 7. Crazy, eh? And it's really rare to find someone who has a genuine memory at 1 or 2.
So today's class was about theories explaining *why* this occurs. There were all of these stupid theories that really didn't make any sense, then there was Freud, saying we were too sexual and repressed them to spare ourselves self-loathing, and then there was Piaget. Ahhh, Piaget. I love him and I hate him. We all at least recognize his name, right, and anyone with kids has probably read a parenting book or something which probably mentioned him at some point....anyway. He has these stages of development. There's the sensorimotor, then preoperational. In sensorimotor, there is no symbolic thought. You can't think about something when it's not there. So while you know your Mom, you think of Mom as the way you interact with her, and the way she smells, and the way she handles you. You don't think of this abstract idea of Mom in your head. So that's the way all thinking is at this time. And in the preoperational period, there is symoblic representation, so things like language and thinking about people who aren't there are possible, but thinking is also pretty illogical. Preoperational children use things like transductive reasoning instead of deductive or inductive. Most everyone's first memories are in these preoperational stage, but probably rather fragmented, and you can't be certain what came before what, so there's no strong sense of chronology, unlike memories after ten or so, when you can remember something, and know where it really fits in. Aaaanyways. Piaget thinks that the reason we can't remember things from our sensorimotor period is because we're trying to remember them using our symbolic thought that we use as adults, but memories from then weren't stored like that, they were stored with actions and sensations, and thus aren't directly accessible to us. And later on, in preoperational, our memories are spotty and fragmented because we both don't have a complete mastery symbolic representations such as language, but we also don't have reasoning that would have helped us, at that time, assemble them in some sort of chronological order. And *that* is why the closest you might be able to come to a emmory from your sensorimotor period is if a friend wears the same perfume as your Mom, and they keep reminding you of your Mom, and you don't know why. Stuff like that.
But! We're not into what really pertains to Ben K, yet. That was background. So, what about autobiographical memories? There are episodic memories (a specific event at a specific time) and generic event memories (like being given a bath, or a basic script for what happens at a birthday party or the zoo). Generally, we forget episodic events, unless something particularly exceptional or weird happens during it. So eating my apple at lunch today, I won't remember that specific memory. ButI take an apple with me every day, and years from now, I might look back and remember the generic event of me taking an apple and eating it during breaks between classes. For a little kid, if an episodic event happens like 5 times in three months, it will become a generic event. But most kids don't have these autobiographical memories, because they only have generic event memories, so how do they get autobiographical memories? It depends on their parents! Some parents are "elaborate parents" who when asking their kid about something, helps them out, and gives them all these details, and all these clues to remember what happened last month at grandpa's house. "Pragmatic parents," if their kid doesn't remember what happened, will probably just say, "Yes, you do, you remember. Come on, who did you see at Grandpa's last month?" They don't actually help the kid try to remember. But, through the elaborate parents providing such a detailed picture so often of what happened, the kid relives the exact same event again and again, turning an episodic memory into something autobiographical, which wouldn't normally occur for a child that age. However, maybe you've spotted a consequence of this. Things that are salient to little kids tend to be quite different than what's salient to an adult. What an adult thinks is totally cool and unusual is probably very different than what is to a kid. A kid might just be staring at the texture of the fur of a bunny they're holding, with the idea "soft" in their head, while their parent is like, "Cool, a rabbit." Later on, the kid will probably think of hte event more as something soft rather than remembering that they were holding a rabbit. But when the parent keeps recounting holding the rabbit, and what the rabbit was like, and what rabbits do, the parents' ideas of what is salient and what happened will gradually take replace what was salient to the kid, and eventually he'll think of the rabbit, rather than just the idea of soft or fluffy or whatever. So, I think it's really interesting to see how kids' memories can be changed like that.
Aaaand this idea of salience is what I'm getting to with Ben K. As an 8 or 9 year old (or any age, really), something in a particular situation could strike the kid as very salient. If that happens, what is salient will probably be linked to future memories in the kid's head. So, if something happens one or two Christmases that strike the kid a lot, every Christmas afterwards will probably be associated with that somewhat. So, if I have a particuarly striking memory of some events, don't blame me for not being able to dissociate it from past similar events, since I might want what was very salient to me at one time, but probably doesn't have any real founding in tradition, or being repeated more than two or three times. As an older sibling with many previous Christmas "scripts" in one's head, what stood out so much to me probably whizzed through your head, without making much of an impression. And maybe *that*'s! why I really want some things to be just so. Either that, or I just love to imagine certain things being important to me. :) You know, either or.
That was an awful lot of explanation about memory to make a very weak point at the end, so sorry. But I did think that was an awesome lecture. If you're really lucky, maybe I'll tell you the story about how Piaget realized that memories are our own creation. It's pretty fun. :)
