Using Cue Words to Investigate the Distribution of Autobiographical Memories in Childhood

Abstract

The cue-word technique is frequently used with adults to examine the distribution of autobiographical memories across the life span. Such studies demonstrate childhood amnesia: a paucity of memories of events from the first 3(1/2) years of life, and a gradually increasing number of memories from age 3 to age 7. The pattern is remarkable in light of findings of autobiographical competence among children in the period of life eventually obscured by this amnesia. In the present study, we modified the cue-word task for use with school-age children. Seven- to 10-year-olds successfully generated and dated memories of past events. Girls provided more complete narratives than boys. Across the sample, the resulting distribution of memories was better fit by an exponential than by a power function, implying that early memories may not consolidate and instead remain vulnerable to interference. Implications for explanations of childhood amnesia are discussed.

Electrophysiological indices of emotion processing during retrieval of autobiographical memories by school-age children

“…Because emotion was not yet explicitly introduced in this phase of the study, no emotion information was conveyed in the emoticon that was positioned under each of the cue words (i.e., the mouth line was omitted). Consistent with prior research on children's autobiographical narratives (e.g., Bauer et al, 2007;Burch et al, 2004), most of the events that the children described in the neutral condition were affectively neutral, and some were mildly positive. For words in the negative condition, children were asked to think of an event when they were "unhappy" and felt "angry, sad, or upset."…”

“…This trend is consistent with research on the narrative accounts that children generate to describe autobiographical events. In the autobiographical memory literature, when no explicit mention of emotion or valence is provided in the elicitation instruction, the events that children choose to describe are affectively neutral to mildly positive (e.g., Bauer et al, 2007;Burch et al, 2004). Conversely, why we failed to observe differential neural processing in the negative relative to the neutral condition is unclear.…”

“…Guided by previous studies (e.g., Bauer et al, 2007;Rubin, 1982), we selected 45 neutral common nouns as cue words. These cue words are provided in Appendix A.…”

“…Outside of the domain of emotion, the utility of the cue word elicitation task for school-age children has been demonstrated in Bauer, Burch, Scholin, and Güler (2007), in which 7-to 10-year-old children provided brief narrative descriptions of past personal events in response to cue words. In the present research, we used the technique to elicit affectively positive and negative as well as neutral past events.…”

The psychology of intelligence analysis: Drivers of prediction accuracy in world politics.

“…To use the earlier example, if Time 1 recall was of 100 memories, then recall at Times 2, 3, and 4 would be of 50, 25, and 12.5 memories, respectively. This pattern implies that the pool of memories available for recollection is ever-shrinking, suggesting that memories do not consolidate (see Bauer, 2012;Bauer et al, 2007;and Bauer & Larkina, 2014, for discussions). The contrast between a distribution of memories characterized by the exponential function relative to the power function is provided in Figure 5.…”