Autobiographical Memory Think back to your childhood and try to identify your earliest memory. How old were you? It is unlikely that you will report that you were an infant or perhaps even a toddler. Most people are not able to recount memories for experiences prior to age three years, a phenomenon called infantile amnesia. The question of why infantile amnesia occurs has intrigued psychologists for decades, especially in light of the ample evidence that infants and young children can display impressive memory capabilities. Many find that understanding the general nature of autobiographical memories, memories of events that have occurred in one's own life, can provide some important clues to this mystery. Between ages three and four, children begin to give fairly lengthy and cohesive descriptions of events in their past, often marking them with explicit references to time ("last Halloween" or "on my birthday). What factors are responsible for this developmental turning point?
One explanation goes back to an idea raised by Piaget, namely, that children under age two years represent events in a qualitatively different form than older children. According to this line of thought, the verbal abilities that blossom in the two-year-old allow events to be coded in a form radically different from the action-based codes of the infant. The child's emerging verbal skills are, in fact, relates to memory for personal experiences. Preverbal children who see unique events at age two do not describe them in verbal terms six months later when they are able to talk. Thus early memories seem to be encoded in a format that cannot be translated into verbal terms later on.
Another suggestion is that, before children can talk about past event in their life, they need to have a reasonable understanding of the self as a psychological entity. As we saw in Chapter 7, the development of the self becomes evident between the first and second years of lift and shows rapid elaboration in subsequent years. The realization that the physical self has continuity in time, according to this hypothesis, lays the foundation for the emergence of autobiographical memory. Research has confirmed that the ability to recognize the self at nineteen months of age predicts the frequency with which children talk about pas events when they are a few months older.
A third possibility is that children will not be able to tell their own "life story" until they understand something about the general form stories take; that is the structure of narratives. Knowledge about narratives arises from social interaction, particularly the storytelling children experience with parents and the attempts parents make to talk with children about past events in their lift. When parents talk with children about "what we did today" or "last week" or "last year", they guide the children's formation of a framework for talking about the past. They also provide children with reminders about the memory and relay the message that memories are valued as part of the cultural experience. It is interesting to note that Caucasian children have earlier childhood memories than Korean children do. American children also provide more extensive, detailed descriptions of events in their past than do Korean and Chinese children. By the same token, Caucasian mothers who ask their children many questions about past events, elaborating on their children's comments or asking for more details ("And what did Daddy do on the boat?), tend to have children who talk more about the past. Thus the types of social experiences children have factor into development of autobiographical memories.
A final suggestion is that children must begin to develop a "theory of mind" before they can talk about their own past memories. Once children begin to accurately answer questions like "what does it mean to remember?" and "what does it mean to know something?" improvements in memory also seem to occur.
If may be that the developments just described are intertwined with and influence one another, that the ability to talk about one's past arises from the interplay of several factors, not just one. Talking with parents about the past may enhance the development of the self-concept, for example, as well as help the child understand what it means to "remember"