Me Too!: Social modelling influences on early autobiographical memories

What is your earliest memory? It depends

This article is a selective review of the literature on childhood amnesia, followed by new analyses of both published and unpublished data that has been collected in my laboratory over two decades. Analyses point to the fluidity of people's earliest memories; furthermore, methodological variation leads to individuals recalling memories from substantially earlier in their lives. How early one's "earliest" memory is depends on whether you have multiple interviews, how many early memories were requested within an interview, the type of interview, participation in prior tasks, etc. As well, people often provide chronologically earlier memories within the same interview in which they later identify a chronologically older memory as their "earliest". There may also be systematic mis-dating to older ages of very early memories. Overall, people may have a lot more memories from their preschool years than is widely believed, and be able to recall events from earlier in their lives than has been historically documented.

Manipulating the reported age in earliest memories

Previous work suggests that the estimated age in adults' earliest autobiographical memories depends on age information implied by the experimental context [e.g., Kingo, O. S., Bohn, A., & Krøjgaard, P. (2013). Warm-up questions on early childhood memories affect the reported age of earliest memories in late adolescence. Memory, 21(2), 280-284. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2012.729598 ] and that the age in decontextualised snippets of memory is younger than in more complete accounts (i.e., event memories [Bruce, D., Wilcox-O'Hearn, L. A., Robinson, J. A., Phillips-Grant, K., Francis, L., & Smith, M. C. (2005). Fragment memories mark the end of childhood amnesia. Memory & Cognition, 33(4), 567-576. doi: 10.3758/BF03195324 ]). We examined the malleability of the estimated age in undergraduates' earliest memories and its relation with memory quality. In Study 1 (n = 141), vignettes referring to events happening at age 2 rendered earlier reported ages than examples referring to age 6. Exploratory analyses suggested that event memories were more sensitive to the age manipulation than memories representing a single, isolated scene (i.e., snapshots). In Study 2 (n = 162), asking self-relevant and public-event knowledge questions about participants' preschool years prior to retrieval yielded comparable average estimated ages. Both types of semantic knowledge questions rendered earlier memories than a no-age control task. Overall, the reported age in snapshots was younger than in event memories. However, age-differences between memory types across conditions were not statistically significant. Together, the results add to the growing literature indicating that the average age in earliest memories is not as fixed as previously thought.

Anchoring effects on early autobiographical memories

Studies of childhood memory typically show that our earliest memories come from between three and four years of age. This finding is not universal, however. The age estimate varies across cultures and is affected by social influences. Research from the judgments and decision-making literature suggests that these estimates might also involve a judgment under uncertainty. Therefore, they might be susceptible to less social influences such as heuristics and biases. To investigate this possibility, we conducted two experiments that used anchoring paradigms to influence participants' estimates of their age during early autobiographical memories. In Experiment 1, participants answered either a high-anchor or a low-anchor question, and were warned that the anchor was uninformative; they went on to estimate their age during their earliest autobiographical memory. In Experiment 2, we replicated Experiment 1 and extended the design to examine additional early autobiographical memories. In both experiments, participants in the low-anchor condition gave earlier age estimates than those in the high-anchor condition. These results provide new insights into the methods used to investigate autobiographical memory. Moreover, they show that reports of early autobiographical memories can be influenced by a relatively light touch - a change to a single digit in a single question.

False accusations in an investigative context: differences between suggestible and non-suggestible witnesses

False sexual abuse allegations have spurred research on suggestibility, on the assumption that leading questions may produce false accusations. Most researchers, however, have not measured the likelihood that those who respond to suggestive questioning will take the next step and make a formal (false) accusation. The present study incorporates both aspects of abuse investigations: suggestibility (i.e., responsiveness to questions in a leading interview) and false accusations (i.e., signing a formal complaint against an innocent suspect). Participants (N = 129) were observed in a laboratory session and then interviewed twice about their experiences by an interviewer who suggested that the laboratory assistant had behaved inappropriately. Although only 17% of the participants were suggestible, 39% agreed to sign the complaint. Suggestible participants were significantly more likely to make a false accusation than were non-suggestible participants. However, because of the low rate of suggestibility, most false accusations were made by non-suggestible participants. Implications for the legal system are discussed.

Emotional Impact Feedback Changes How We Remember Negative Autobiographical Experiences

When people are told that their negative memories are worse than other people’s, do they later remember those events differently? We asked participants to recall a recent negative memory then, 24 h later, we gave some participants feedback about the emotional impact of their event – stating it was more or less negative compared to other people’s experiences. One week later, participants recalled the event again. We predicted that if feedback affected how participants remembered their negative experiences, their ratings of the memory’s characteristics should change over time. That is, when participants are told that their negative event is extremely negative, their memories should be more vivid, recollected strongly, and remembered from a personal perspective, compared to participants in the other conditions. Our results provide support for this hypothesis. We suggest that external feedback might be a potential mechanism in the relationship between negative memories and psychological well-being.

Culture, gender, and the first memories of black and white American students

A pattern of delayed offset of childhood amnesia in Asian cultures has been attributed to the influence of the collectivist orientation of these cultures. To explore the generality of this finding, black and white American students were compared in two studies. A culture × gender interaction was observed in both studies; black women were approximately 11-16 months older at the time of their first memory than were black men, white women, and white men. In the second study, analyses of memory content indicated that black women were least likely to report personal experiences and most likely to report experiences from family or wider social contexts. Overall, black participants rated their memories as more vivid, but there were culture × gender interactions for ratings of emotional intensity and coherence. We consider multiple influences on age at first memory, including distal influences, gender themes in self-construal, and proximal influences on search criteria.