Reminiscing With Mothers and Others: Autobiographical Memory in Young Two-Year-Olds

1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith A. Hudson

Abstract This study investigated effects of maternal elicitation style, repeated recall sessions, and retention interval on 2-year-olds' autobiographical memory. Ten mothers and their children from 24 to 30 months of age verbally recalled the same four events once a week for 4 weeks. Two weeks later, an experimenter interviewed children about the same events as well as about four new events. Half of the events had taken place in the recent past (up to 6 months); the other half were from the remote past (6 to 10 months). Children recalled specific information about events occurring up to 10 months in the past, although they recalled more information about recent events than about remote events. Chil-dren were very much dependent on an adult partner to cue their recall. If specific cues were not provided, children rarely volunteered information. Chil-dren's conversations with their mothers affected their recall with the experi-menter: Children responded to more information requests, produced more offers of information, and recalled more specific information about events they had previously discussed with mothers than when recalling new events with the experimenter. However, children recalled more information with their mothers than with the experimenter, and prior discussions with mothers did not increase the amount of information children recalled with the experimenter. Two mater-nal elicitation styles were identified that were related to differences in children's responsiveness and amount of recall: Children of high elaboration mothers were more responsive and recalled more information than children of low elaboration mothers. (Psychology)

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (10) ◽  
pp. e0259279
Author(s):  
Ali Mair ◽  
Marie Poirier ◽  
Martin A. Conway

Studies examining age effects in autobiographical memory have produced inconsistent results. This study examined whether a set of typical autobiographical memory measures produced equivalent results in a single participant sample. Five memory tests (everyday memory, autobiographical memory from the past year, autobiographical memory from age 11–17, word-cued autobiographical memory, and word-list recall) were administered in a single sample of young and older adults. There was significant variance in the tests’ sensitivity to age: word-cued autobiographical memory produced the largest deficit in older adults, similar in magnitude to word-list recall. In contrast, older adults performed comparatively well on the other measures. The pattern of findings was broadly consistent with the results of previous investigations, suggesting that (1) the results of the different AM tasks are reliable, and (2) variable age effects in the autobiographical memory literature are at least partly due to the use of different tasks, which cannot be considered interchangeable measures of autobiographical memory ability. The results are also consistent with recent work dissociating measures of specificity and detail in autobiographical memory, and suggest that specificity is particularly sensitive to ageing. In contrast, detail is less sensitive to ageing, but is influenced by retention interval and event type. The extent to which retention interval and event type interact with age remains unclear; further research using specially designed autobiographical memory tasks could resolve this issue.


2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (6) ◽  
pp. 563-569 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirko Tõugu ◽  
Tiia Tulviste ◽  
Kristi Suits

Personal recollections constitute autobiographical memory that develops intensively during the preschool years. The two-wave longitudinal study focuses on gender differences in preschool children’s independent recollections. The same children ( N = 275; 140 boys, 135 girls) were asked to talk about their previous birthday and the past weekend at the ages of 4 and 6. Interactions were coded for content. Boys talked more about themselves and about different nonsocial aspects of the events. Girls talked more about the other people with whom they had jointly experienced the past event. It seems that gender differences in children’s recollections appear early and increase during the preschool period.


2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison

AbstractThis paper explores a central paradox in the aims of the archaeology of the contemporary past as they have been articulated by its practitioners. On the one hand, its aim has been expressed as one of making the familiar ‘unfamiliar’, of distancing the observer from their own material world; a work of alienation. On the other hand, it has also aimed to make the past more accessible and egalitarian; to recover lost, subaltern voices and in this way to close the distance between past and present. I suggest that this paradox has stymied its development and promoted a culture of self-justification for a subfield which has already become well established within archaeology over the course of three decades. I argue that this paradox arises from archaeology's relationship with modernity and the past itself, as a result of its investment in the modernist trope of archaeology-as-excavation and the idea of a past which is buried and hidden. One way of overcoming this paradox would be to emphasize an alternative trope of archaeology-as-surface-survey and a process of assembling/reassembling, and indeed to shift away from the idea of an ‘archaeology of the contemporary past’ to speak instead of an archaeology ‘in and of the present’. This would reorient archaeology so that it is seen primarily as a creative engagement with the present and only subsequently as a consideration of the intervention of traces of the past within it. It is only by doing this that archaeology will develop into a discipline which can successfully address itself to the present and future concerns of contemporary societies. Such a move not only has implications for archaeologies of the present and recent past, but concerns the very nature and practice of archaeology as a discipline in its broadest sense in the 21st century.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Mair ◽  
marie poirier ◽  
Martin A. Conway

Published age effects in naturalistic memory are inconsistent. This study examined whether a set of typical naturalistic memory measures produced equivalent results in a single participant sample. Four naturalistic memory tests (everyday memory, autobiographical memory from the past year, autobiographical memory from age 11-17, word-cued autobiographical memory) and one laboratory test (word-list recall) were administered to 20 young and 20 older adults. There was significant variance in the tests’ sensitivity to age: word-cued autobiographical memory produced the largest deficit in older adults, similar in magnitude to word-list recall. In contrast, older adults performed comparatively well on the other measures, which were more ecologically valid. Retention interval, executive function, and event characteristics influenced performance, but none of these factors could account for the pattern of age effects. Further research is needed to understand the face validity of these naturalistic memory tasks, and future investigations should be mindful of their ecological validity.


2011 ◽  
Vol 39 (6) ◽  
pp. 871-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ashbrook

In most studies of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, identity politics focuses on nationalism. Unfortunately, very few examine regional identities and how they too are politicized in similar ways for similar reasons. Istria provides a good example of how identity is politicized and how and why individuals adapt it to both internal and external influences. While in the past local and regional identities were politicized in response to colonization, more recently national divisions became more prominent. However, in the very recent past, Istrian identity again became politicized as many natives drew lines between themselves and what they saw as an external national influence emanating from Zagreb. In the 1990s, a renewed Croatian national movement competed with an Istrian regional movement. Istrian regionalists, seeking to justify taking and maintaining regional power and hoping to more quickly bring Croatia into the European Union, used this new political tactic against the nationalizing Croatian government. While both the nationalists and the regionalists claimed the other side's ideology was foreign to Istria, in actuality both have historical roots in the region. Though the competition was not as virulent as in past episodes of nationalist tension between Italians and Croats, it does fit a pattern of continuity in the region.


Author(s):  
K. T. Tokuyasu

During the past investigations of immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in ultrathin frozen sections, we found that the degree of negative staining required to delineate u1trastructural details was often too dense for the recognition of ferritin particles. The quality of positive staining of ultrathin frozen sections, on the other hand, has generally been far inferior to that attainable in conventional plastic embedded sections, particularly in the definition of membranes. As we discussed before, a main cause of this difficulty seemed to be the vulnerability of frozen sections to the damaging effects of air-water surface tension at the time of drying of the sections.Indeed, we found that the quality of positive staining is greatly improved when positively stained frozen sections are protected against the effects of surface tension by embedding them in thin layers of mechanically stable materials at the time of drying (unpublished).


Author(s):  
Prakash Rao

Image shifts in out-of-focus dark field images have been used in the past to determine, for example, epitaxial relationships in thin films. A recent extension of the use of dark field image shifts has been to out-of-focus images in conjunction with stereoviewing to produce an artificial stereo image effect. The technique, called through-focus dark field electron microscopy or 2-1/2D microscopy, basically involves obtaining two beam-tilted dark field images such that one is slightly over-focus and the other slightly under-focus, followed by examination of the two images through a conventional stereoviewer. The elevation differences so produced are usually unrelated to object positions in the thin foil and no specimen tilting is required.In order to produce this artificial stereo effect for the purpose of phase separation and identification, it is first necessary to select a region of the diffraction pattern containing more than just one discrete spot, with the objective aperture.


GeroPsych ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Peters ◽  
Signy Sheldon

Abstract. We examined whether interindividual differences in cognitive functioning among older adults are related to episodic memory engagement during autobiographical memory retrieval. Older adults ( n = 49, 24 males; mean age = 69.93; mean education = 15.45) with different levels of cognitive functioning, estimated using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), retrieved multiple memories (generation task) and the details of a single memory (elaboration task) to cues representing thematic or event-specific autobiographical knowledge. We found that the MoCA score positively predicted the proportion of specific memories for generation and episodic details for elaboration, but only to cues that represented event-specific information. The results demonstrate that individuals with healthy, but not unhealthy, cognitive status can leverage contextual support from retrieval cues to improve autobiographical specificity.


2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 215-224
Author(s):  
Alexander Carpenter

This paper explores Arnold Schoenberg’s curious ambivalence towards Haydn. Schoenberg recognized Haydn as an important figure in the German serious music tradition, but never closely examined or clearly articulated Haydn’s influence and import on his own musical style and ethos, as he did with many other major composers. This paper argues that Schoenberg failed to explicitly recognize Haydn as a major influence because he saw Haydn as he saw himself, namely as a somewhat ungainly, paradoxical figure, with one foot in the past and one in the future. In his voluminous writings on music, Haydn is mentioned by Schoenberg far less frequently than Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, and his music appears rarely as examples in Schoenberg’s theoretical texts. When Schoenberg does talk about Haydn’s music, he invokes — with tacit negativity — its accessibility, counterpoising it with more recondite music, such as Beethoven’s, or his own. On the other hand, Schoenberg also praises Haydn for his complex, irregular phrasing and harmonic exploration. Haydn thus appears in Schoenberg’s writings as a figure invested with ambivalence: a key member of the First Viennese triumvirate, but at the same time he is curiously phantasmal, and is accorded a peripheral place in Schoenberg’s version of the canon and his own musical genealogy.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document