Memory and Affect in Development

The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, Volume 26

Charles A. Nelson

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138980846
• eBook ISBN: 9781317781752
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

As in recent years, a thematic concept was selected over a general one for the 26th annual Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology. In this case the relation between memory and affect was targeted for two reasons. The first concerned the a priori theoretical relation between these content areas. The second concerned the observation that memory and affect have historically been studied as separate content areas--an unfortunate decision considering the potential of each area to inform the other. To redress this, investigators working on the relation between memory and affect were identified. Their presentations are also anchored by one or two presentations on either memory or affect. Those familiar with the broader domain of developmental psychology will readily identify this volume in the series as filling the void left by the lack of integration across domains of study.

1	Events, Narratives, Memory: What Develops?

Katherine Nelson

City University of New York Graduate Center

Students of memory have been faced with the persistent problem of what it is that they are studying, and whether it comes in different types or whether there is a single structure, process, or function called Memory. Developmentalists face this problem particularly when they try to determine when and if some memory capacity or function emerges in childhood. In recent years developmental researchers have focused attention on generic event memory or scripts, episodic memory for specific episodes of events, and autobiographical memory as a particular type of episodic memory that constitutes one’s life story. In contrast to these types of event memory is semantic memory, as first identified by Tulving (1972), which is organized as a decontexted knowledge system. In this paper I trace the evolution of thinking about these types of memory, based on early work with my group of colleagues and students at Yale and CUNY, and then bring this thinking up-to-date, based on a broad range of studies from other labs as well as our own.

Tulving’s (1972) distinction between semantic and episodic memory was influential in my initial approach to problems in memory development in early childhood, beginning in the mid-1970s. However, because memories for real-life experiences, especially those from the infancy and very early childhood period, do not seem well-characterized as semantic (because they might not have any verbal component), I preferred the term generic as a contrast to episodic. Yet as has become evident, there is more than one type of generic memory.

The developmental problem posed by this distinction at first appeared to me to be frameable simply in terms of the origins of episodic and generic (semantic) memory—might one precede the other in development? (See Nelson & Brown, 1979.) When we first began pursuit of this question, there was next to no research on memory in children younger than school-age. One of the reasons for this neglect seemed to be the kind of memory that developmental researchers were concerned with, primarily verbal memory tested with lists of words or pictures. Preschool children were shown to perform poorly on these kinds of laboratory-based tasks. As Donaldson (1978) demonstrated for many types of tasks, preschool children may perform in ways that better reflect their cognitive abilities when presented with situations that make “human sense” to them, that is, that resemble situations that they experience in their everyday lives. Following this line of work memory researchers began to ask, not whether children could remember the things we had devised for them to remember—usually words, pictures, or objects—but what they could remember about the things they did everyday.

Thus the situation with respect to pre-school memory has changed dramatically over the past 20 years as an emerging perspective on ecologically valid and ethnographically situated memory research took memory out of the laboratory and into homes and day care centers to focus on the activities that children are involved in in their everyday lives and the kinds of information that they must remember if they are to carry through those activities successfully. This has been our focus at CUNY from the beginning. We have studied children’s memory for experienced events, involving people, places, and actions. We have viewed memory for words and objects not as decontexted items but in terms of how they fit into the child’s schemas for knowing about events. (See Perlmutter, 1980 for a collection of papers on this early work.)

Our first studies primarily concerned children’s general event memory, or scripts for familiar events (Nelson & Gruendel, 1981). We found that children as young as 3 years had quite good and reliable representations of familiar, routine events, and could present a verbal account of them. We characterized this knowledge as generic, because it was almost always formulated in very general terms. Because the same children seemed not to have very good representations of specific episodes in their lives (Hudson & Nelson, 1986), we tentatively concluded that generic memory preceded episodic in development. This seemed to be a somewhat radical conclusion in that it implied that children’s memory was abstract before it was specific, the opposite to traditional assumptions about development.

The script model that Schank and Abelson (1977) developed to describe narrative understanding and plans in terms of action sequences organized around a goal seemed to fit these early data from young children quite well. Our studies showed that preschool children have good generic script-type knowledge enabling them to represent familiar events in canonical causal-temporal sequences of actions, organized in terms of central events or goals, embedding sets of objects that fill action-object slots, and roles that people play within the event script. This generic knowledge, in the form of general event representations or scripts, was further shown to play a role in children’s understanding and use of complex language, interpretation of and memory for stories and dramatic play, production of fantasy stories, and even the organization of object categories (French & Nelson, 1985; Lucariello & Nelson, 1985; Nelson, 1986; Nelson & Gruendel, 1979).

We therefore proposed that children first constructed scripts for familiar events, and that only after having established a sufficient body of script knowledge, would they be able to use that knowledge as a background from which to remember or reconstruct memory for a specific novel event. This conclusion seemed to fit well with the apparent difficulty that young children had in remembering episodes without a great deal of cuing from adults (Nelson, Fivush, Hudson, & Lucariello, 1983; Nelson & Ross, 1980). It also suggested an explanation for the phenomenon of infantile amnesia, the inability to remember events from the early years of one’s life (Nelson, 1990; in press).

As I have commented elsewhere (Nelson, in press), it is quite remarkable that developmental psychologists—even those studying memory in young children— have in general neglected the infantile amnesia phenomenon, despite its clear implication that some very dramatic development takes place in the early childhood years that either establishes a new memory system, or enables existing memories to persist, or represses those that do exist (Freud, 1963). (See Pillemer & White, 1989 for a review of these issues. See also Bachevalier, 1992 for an alternative, neurally based explanation of the phenomenon.) The explanation for this development that was suggested by our initial inquiry was that adults do not remember episodes from early childhood because young children do not have episodic memory, but only general script memory; everything that is remembered from an experience is entered into the general script system. Only after that system is well-established could specific episodes be seen as novel and memorable in their own right.

Note that script memory is highly functional. It enables a person to predict and plan for future encounters of a similar situation, as well as to guide action within a familiar event, and to interpret reports or stories told by other people about such an event. Indeed, from a functional perspective, scripts appear to have much greater value than episodic memories for one-time happenings (Nelson, 1989b; in press). Thus it seems that evolution might have developed script-type generic memory as the basic form of human (as well as of other mammalian) memory. This possibility raised the questions: Why should children (or adults) ever have episodic memories? When might episodic memories become part of a long-lasting autobiographical memory system?

Contrary to our earlier conclusion, however, subsequent investigations at CUNY (e.g., Hudson, 1986; Hudson & Nelson, 1986; Nelson, 1989a; Nelson & Hudson, 1988)—and a great deal of research that Robyn Fivush, Judith Hudson, and other researchers have carried out since—established that very young children—as young as 1 year of age—do have, not only general event representations, but also specific memories for particular episodes in their lives. Our initial supposition that generic memory was first established to the exclusion of specific memories appeared to be wrong. These conclusions are based on a variety of studies, including parental reports, experimenter interviews about specific naturally occurring experiences, taperecording children talking alone (see description that follows), and questioning children about staged experimental episodes.

There remains something elusive about these findings, however. Children often require extensive cuing to elicit any information about events that they have experienced. Asking children to report on events they have experienced is not always fruitful; it often seems that the adult’s memory is not matched by the child’s, although children may report elements that adults have not noticed or have forgotten. Perhaps the absence of adult memories for early childhood experiences is the result of differential interests or attention. Moreover, young children’s memories do not usually seem to endure for longer than about 6 months, unlike the memories of older children and adults, which in some cases last for decades. (Fivush & Hamond, 1990 have found evidence of memories in 4 year olds from as long as 2 years in the past, but this time span may be exceptional. Further verification to determine the conditions under which long-lasting memories in the early childhood years may be established is clearly needed.)

The questions raised earlier remain unanswered, however. The establishment of clear evidence that children have some episodic memories suggests further questions that might provide the central clue: What episodes do children remember and why?

In what follows I seek answers to these questions through evidence of very early episodic memory accounts and generic memory in one child’s talk to herself, inquiring as to what enters into that talk and why. I then consider evidence of the influence of adult talk on the development of episodic or autobiographical memory with respect to the past, the present activity, and the future, and consider how each of these types of talk may affect memory for an event. I then consider the psychological and social sources of episodic and autobiographical memory together and suggest issues that may be resolved in future research. Finally, I consider how what Tulving referred to as Semantic Memory may have its roots as well in parent-child talk.

CHILD TALK ABOUT THE PAST: MONOLOGUE AND DIALOGUE

In pursuit of the answer to the “what” question, in 1981 I enlisted the help of a very cooperative mother and father of a 21-month-old highly verbal little girl, Emily. They agreed to record her talk to herself at bedtime and naptime for the purpose of investigating the nature and form of early episodic memories. I hypothesized that talk to self, which many very young children engage in, might contain revealing references to aspects of memory for real life events from the child’s own perspective that would not be apparent when prompted by adults, even by parents. The resulting transcripts of her talk yielded a rich collection of her memories, both specific and general. These have been subsequently reported in previous publications (Nelson, 1988, 1989a, 1989b), which provide details about the research methods.

The first transcripts that emerged from this study indicated that Emily at 21 months was recalling (alone in her crib) fragments of remembered experiences, such as going to the library with her grandmother. (Such memories were verified by her mother who reviewed the tapes prior to their transcription.) By 24 months a surprising development was observed. The transcripts still contained fragments, but also some recounts that were quite coherently organized as what appeared to be “proto-narratives,” that is, they had the form of a sequence of actions connected temporally and causally within a bounded temporal space. An example of this type from 23 months is the following:

(1)

When my slep and, and, Mormor came. Then Mommy coming,
then get up, time to go ho-o-ome. Time to go home. Drink P-water [Perrrier].
Yesterday did that. Now Emmy sleeping in regular bed.

This account of mommy getting her at her baby sitter’s is certainly not very elaborate or unusual, and i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Events, Narratives, Memory: What Develops?
• 2. Identifying Subsystems of Autobiographical Memory: Commentary on Nelson
• 3. Emotional Content of Parent-Child Conversations About the Past
• 4. The Ontogeny of Memory Revisited: Commentary on Nelson and Fivush
• 5. Troubles in the Garden and How They Get Resolved: A Young Child's Transformation of His Favorite Story
• 6. Placing Affect and Narrative in Developmental and Cultural Context: Comments on Miller et al.
• 7. Children's Memory for Other People: An Integrative Review
• 8. The Child Witness, the Courts, and Psychological Research
• 9. Understanding Children's Memories of Medical Procedures: “He Didn't Touch Me and It Didn't Hurt!”
• 10. A Case Example of Clinically Relevant Research: Commentary on Steward
• 11. From Dialogue to Internal Working Models: The Co-Construction of Self in Relationships
• Author Index
• Subject Index