I don't know how many of you know this, but Piaget was crazy smart. He was a genius. At like fifteen or something, a museum offered him the job of head curator based on papers he published. When he wrote back and told them that he was very sorry, but he couldn't accept their offer because he was fifteen and doing something...fifteenish, the museum was really embarrassed.
Anyways! Piaget was a genius. His first thoughts on memory were that he thought that the smarter you were, the earlier your memories were. So it was just an intelligence thing. Evidence of this was that his first memory was when he was still in diapers, being pushed about in a pram by his nanny in Switzerland.
"I can still see, most clearly, the following scene. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station. [p. 188]"
He believed this memory until he was fifteen. The nanny, apparently, had been converted by the Salvation Army, and was writing to everyone to repent of her sins and apologize. She wrote Piaget's parents, and returned the gold watch that they'd given her in return for her brave defense of their son, because it turned out she'd made the whole thing up and inflicted the scratches on her face herself.
And that led to all this interesting research by Piaget on memories!! Tomorrow, I'll tell you a funny study about on men's and women's views on casual sex. At least, I think it's really funny. We're doing Attraction and Liking in Social Psychology right now.
