Task 3 Flashcards
What is childhood amnesia?
Phenomenon where adults are unable to remember specific events from the first few years of life
What are the characteristics of childhood amnesia?
Absence of declarative memory.
Childhood amnesia emerges by middle school (e.g. by 8-9 they have forgotten a substantial amount of early events)
Exponential forgetting in childhood
What are the two phases of childhood amnesia?
No remembrance of events in the first 2-3 years of life
Recall of few memories from ages 3-7 year.
Name the two main theories of childhood amnesia
Human cognitive/psychological theory
Biological theory
What are the two accounts for infantile amnesia according to the human cognitive theories?
Late emergence: The role of self, ToM, or language
Disappearance: Impairments in encoding, storage or recall
Name the two ways in which the biological theories account for infantile amnesia.
Immature brain development
Ongoing brain development/neurogenesis
One cognitive explanation for infantile amnesia is related to late emergence. Explain this perspective.
The ability to form enduring memories (offset infantile amnesia) in humans is related to the emergence of the acquisition of sense of self, ToM or language.
Another cognitive perspective in explaining infantile amnesia is that memories disappear. Explain this perspective.
Impairment in memory encoding, storage, or recall
Normal memory is never acquired by an infant, so this memory cannot be recalled during adulthood.
On the other hand, it may be that memory are formed in childhood & permanently stored, but its retrieval in adulthood is not possible
Memory retrieval deficit: memories are recalled when the retrieval conditions (both internal & external) closely match the retrieval conditions at encoding.
Explain the immature brain theory of infantile amnesia
either that infantile amnesia occurs because key structures for memory formation and storage are insufficiently mature at the time of memory formation to process these memories (“immature brain” theories).
Two key regions for declarative memory (cortex & hippocampus-dentate gyrus) show protracted postnatal development. Infantile amnesia may be due to the cortex not being online.
Older infants’ better encoding of information may be related to the more matured cortex.
According to the immature brain hypothesis of infantile amnesia, two key regions for declarative memory show protracted postnatal development.
What are these two regions?
Cortex & hippocampus dentate gyrus
Another theory of infantile amnesia is the ongoing brain maturation.. Explain.
alternatively, that the very process of ongoing maturation interferes with stable memory consolidation (“ongoing brain maturation” theories
The key idea here is that, while memory formation is more or less normal in infants, continued brain maturation after initial acquisition may interfere with stabilization or consolidation of the memory trace
continued postnatal production of new neurons in the hippocampus—regulates the ability to form enduring hippocampus-dependent memories.
The inability to form stable, persistent memories in early life coincides with a period of high neurogenesis, whereas the ability to form stable, persistent memories only emerges at later developmental periods as the rate of neurogenesis declines
integration of these “new neurons” degrades existing memories by either increasing the excitability (and therefore instability) of hippocampal memory networks or replacing synaptic connections in preexisting hippocampal memory circuits
Describe the complementary process account
The amnesia can be understood in terms of the complementary processes that improve memory traces and that degrade them.
There are processes (e.g. cog, mnemonic, neural) that contribute to the quality of memory traces & to the decreases in their vulnerability to forgetting.
Forgetting is at an exponential rate in childhood; it reduces the pools of memory formed into puddles, which makes them more difficult to retrieve.
Over the course of development, memories bear more and more features that are characteristic of autobiographical memory.
What is implicit memory?
unconscious learning that is expressed by changes in task performance as a result of experience
What is explicit memory (declarative)?
conscious recollection of facts and events.
Describe the development of non-spatial relational memory
nonspatial relational memory emerges between 6 and 12 months of age and
gradually becomes more sophisticated and flexible between 12 and 21 months of age;
