Chapter 12: Memory in Childhood

Question 0

Give details on study about infantile amnesia involving college students and children aged 4-12.

Answer 0

Task: answer specific question about a siblings birth from when they were 3-11 years old
-mothers asked the same questions
Results:
~if birth occurred after 3 years old, very little forgetting
-even if it occurred many years ago
~if birth occurred before 3 years old, virtually nothing was remembered

Question 1

What is infantile amnesia, and why can it be difficult to study?

Answer 1

~Infantile amnesia: tendency for adults to have few autobiographical memories below the age of 5
Studying difficult because:
~Hard to verify memories from childhood
-therefore, focus on dateable, verifiable events (like birth of sibling)
~Hard to know whether childhood memories are genuine recollections or are reconstructed from stories and photographs
-real memories tend to be more visual, less verbal, more emotional, more complete

Question 2

How do we decide if a memory is declarative?

Answer 2

Must pass two filters!

1. Amnesia filter: if an amnesiac can do the task, then it’s implicit
   
   • if not, it’s declarative
2. Parameter filter: if the memory is affected by factors known to influence declarative tasks, then it’s also declarative
   
   • e.g., changes in study time, retention interval, contextual changes

Question 3

Describe a study examining the mnemonic abilities of infants almost immediately after birth.

Answer 3

Task: 3-day-olds learned that sucking on a pacifier activated a tape recording with the voice of either the mother or a stranger
Results:
~Infants sucked on the pacifier more when it was linked to the familiar voice of their mother
~Replicated with infants that were two hours old
Conclusion: newborns possess the ability to remember both their mother’s voice and a novel action that results in the rewarding sound of her voice

Question 4

What are the three phases of the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm?

Answer 4

Baseline: record how often baby kicks when foot isn’t attached to mobile
Learning: infants learn that kicking (response) causes mobile to move (reinforcement)
Test: ribbon detached
-if they kick more than baseline in the presence of the mobile, they remember the connection
-retention interval between learning and test can be manipulated

Question 5

What are the results of the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm with 2 and 3 month olds?

Answer 5

~At short delays, both 2 and 3 month olds showed evidence of retention
-after 2 days, 2 month olds back at baseline
-after a week, 3 month olds still showed a reliable effect
~Presenting a reminder (a moving mobile) before testing reactivated kicking
-after 2 week delay, retention bounced back up to its initial levels
-after 1 month delay, still significant kicking behavior

Question 6

In what ways is the learned kicking behavior specific?

Answer 6

~Perceptual discrimination: if babies were trained on a mobile with yellow blocks, won’t respond to mobile with butterflies
-however, if they’re trained on many different mobiles, they would then generalize the kicking response to novel mobiles
-it’s as if they learned the mobile concept
~Context sensitivity: if you train in one location and test in another, infants show reduced learning

Question 7

Describe a deferred imitation experiment.

Answer 7

Participants: 14 and 24 month olds
Exposure conditions:
-Imitation: observe experimenter pull toy apart
-Control: observe experimenter move toy in circle
-Baseline: give novel toy to infant without pre-exposure
Delay: wait 24 hours before infant is given toy
Results:
~14 months:
-45% of infants in the experimental condition imitated the experimenter’s action
-only 7.5% of infants in control/baseline did those actions
~24 months:
-70% of infants in experimental condition imitated

Question 8

Does deferred imitation require declarative memory? i.e., does it pass the two filters?

Answer 8

YUSS

1. Adult amnesiacs show little evidence of deferred imitation, so it passes the amnesiac filter
2. Preverbal infants who imitated were later able to verbalize their performance
   
   • likely that only declarative memories are accessible to language

Question 9

What are some basic principles of memory development? That is, what are older infants better at?

Answer 9

~Older infants typically encode/store information faster than younger infants
~Older infants remember information over longer delays
~Older infants make use of a greater variety of retrieval cues (i.e., memories are more flexible)
~Forgotten memories can be retrieved when a reminder is presented

Question 10

What is the developmental cognitive neuroscience approach? Describe the benefits and limitations.

Answer 10

This approach says that developments during the first two years of life contribute to better mnemonic abilities.
-Implicit memory controlled by system likely present at birth, while declarative memories depend on late-developing memory systems
Benefits:
~does not simply describe changes, helps to explain why changes arise
~offers a partial understanding of differences between types of memory
Limitations:
~Often relies heavily on correlations between rate of brain maturation and behavioral performance

Question 11

What are some developments in childhood that help improve declarative memory?

Answer 11

~Basic capacity of STM/WM increases over the years
-subvocally rehearse faster/more
-adopt better strategies
~Learn and use new strategies
-Older children more likely than younger ones to employ memory strategies
-Evidence comes from categorized list recall
~Accumulate more knowledge
-Helps to form schemas to organize memories
~Develop better metamemory
-Knowledge about one’s own memory and how it works
-Helps children select the best strategy to use

Question 12

What is the difference between verbatim and gist memory?

Answer 12

~Verbatim memory: contain accurate and detailed information about to-be remembered stimuli
-Reflects the actual experience
-Improves over childhood
~Gist memory: general semantic information about to-be-remembered stimuli
-Reflects a general understanding of an experience
-Improves over childhood as children grow to extract more meaning from information

Question 13

Older children form more gist memory traces. When can this lead to errors? How is this studied?

Answer 13

When…
~learning task leads older children to produce more gist memories than younger children do
~memory test requires verbatim recall/recognition
~greater gist memory increases likelihood of false recall/recognition of information very similar in meaning to the to-be-remembered info
Studied with the DRM paradigm – older children have more false recall/recognition

Question 14

Describe the magic shrinking machine study.

Answer 14

Participants: children aged 24-48 months
Task:
~Children saw large objects go into a machine, but small objects come out
~After 24 hours, given 3 memory tests
-verbal recall
-nonverbal photograph recognition test
-behavioral reenactment
Results:
~Nonverbal tests revealed hidden memory retention by:
-relying less on language
-providing more retrieval cues to the children

Question 15

Describe the social cultural theory of infantile amnesia. Describe a related study (museum study).

Answer 15

~Prelinguistic memories are hard to express using language later
-language skills at the time of the event can dictate what they can recall subsequently
~Children whose parents have an elaborative reminiscing style later report more and fuller childhood memories
-Elaboration provides the children with ample opportunities to rehearse their own memories
-Elaborative style more common in western cultures
Museum study: when mother-child conversations about the museum trip were freely interacting, rather than practical, the children remembered more

Question 16

Describe the cognitive self approach to describing infantile amnesia. What is some evidence?

Answer 16

~Must have a sense of self to form autobiographical memories
-Provides a schema for autobiographical memories
Evidence: (controlling for language)
~Self-recognizers had better memory for personal events
~Pre-self recognizers never had good autobiographical memory

Question 17

Are young children suggestible?

Answer 17

~Young children’s responses are largely consistent with the view of their questioner
~Continue to reflect prior influence even when:
-Questioned by a new, nonsuggestive interviewer
-Warned that the previous interviewer may have been mistaken

Question 18

Why are young children more suggestible?

Answer 18

~Social compliance:
-they yield to authority figures
-lack social support to stand up for their views
~Cognitive incompetence:
-they come to believe their distorted reports because of limitations in processing, attention, and language abilities
~Inability to source monitor
-possible to confuse memory from real life with something an interviewer said

Question 19

How can we maximize the accuracy of eyewitness testimony of children?

Answer 19

~Reduce social compliance
-Avoid leading questions at any point in the questioning process, so child won’t need to comply with anyone else
~Train effective source monitoring techniques
~Reinstate the encoding context
~Use nonverbal recall techniques
-Asking children to draw what they remember before asking for a verbal report can elicit idiosyncratic retrieval cues and nonverbal information
-Children remembered 30% more in drawing condition, which only increased (without adding errors) at longer delays