![]() ![]() “Deflecting a turn to the child encourages the young partner both to participate in the give-and-take of the conversation and to populate the memory representation with her or his own content,” Bauer and Larkina explain. The children in the study tended to remember more details of the events they had discussed at age 3 with their mothers if the mothers had done two things: encouraged the child to elaborate on the memories and let the child determine the course of the conversation. ![]() ![]() The current study also made an interesting finding regarding parents and the way they talk with their children. This new study is apparently the first one to demonstrate the finding using children’s recollections. But those studies used adults’ recollections of childhood. Previous studies have also suggested that age 7 is the inflection point. That finding suggested that age 7 was the “inflection point” for childhood amnesia. In contrast, children 8 to 9 years of age had lost access to many of their memories of events from the same early age.” ![]() That way the researchers could track variations in how much the children remembered (or forgot).īauer and Larkina found that “children 5, 6 and 7 years of age remembered a substantial percentage of events from the age of 3 years. The children were interviewed only once and at different ages, ranging from 5 to 9. Over the next few years, the researchers reestablished contact with the families and asked the children to recall the events that they had discussed with their mothers at age 3. The parents were asked to speak as they normally would to their child. The mothers were recorded as they talked with their child about six neutral to positive events that the child had experienced in the previous months, such as a family outing (a camping trip or a visit with distant relatives) or a positive life transition (the birth of a sibling or the first day of preschool). (Bauer was on the institute’s faculty from 1989 to 2005.) The families were primarily white with a middle or high socioeconomic status. All the families were volunteer participants in the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development and had been part of an earlier study on the development of memories in infants. Participants were Minnesotansįor the study, Bauer and Larkina recruited 81 3-year-olds and their mothers. We conclude by outlining future directions for research, including longitudinal studies and experiments designed to systematically examine gender in autobiographical memory for its own sake.The study’s findings also suggest that how parents talk to their preschoolers can influence how many details their children will later remember about very early events in their lives. An examination of studies in which gender differences are not found suggests that specific instructions, context, gender salience, and the type of autobiographical memory measure used can mitigate gender differences. We propose that gender differences in autobiographical memory development and interpersonal socialization contribute to the differences found, and that gender differences can be attributed, at least in part, to the influence of conversations with parents when autobiographical memory skills are developing. However, not all studies of autobiographical memory find gender differences. Specifically, females include more emotion, more elaboration, and a greater sense of connectedness to others in their narratives, and we consider the possible connection between these tendencies and women’s advantage on a number of autobiographical and episodic memory tasks. When apparent, researchers find gender differences such that women report more vivid memory experiences than men and women include more details about emotions, about other people, and about the meaningfulness of their memories. A., Gender differences in autobiographical memory: Developmental and methodological considerations, 239-272, Copyright (2013), with permission from Elsevier Gender differences have surfaced in inconsistent ways in autobiographical memory studies. Reprinted from Developmental Review, 33, Grysman, A., & Hudson, J. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |