1st Edition
Remembering and Forgetting Early Childhood
This book brings together scholarship that contributes diverse and new perspectives on childhood amnesia – the scarcity of memories for very early life events.
The topics of the studies reported in the book range from memories of infants and young children for recent and distant life events, to mother–child conversations about memories for extended lifetime periods, and to retrospective recollections of early childhood in adolescents and adults. The methodological approaches are diverse and theoretical insights rich. The findings together show that childhood amnesia is a complex and malleable phenomenon and that the waning of childhood amnesia and the development of autobiographical memory are shaped by a variety of interactive social and cognitive factors.
This book will facilitate discussion and deepen an understanding of the dynamics that influence the accessibility, content, accuracy, and phenomenological qualities of memories from early childhood. This book was originally published as a special issue of Memory.
Introduction: New perspectives on childhood amnesia
Qi Wang & Sami Gülgöz
1. Manipulating the reported age in earliest memories
Ineke Wessel, Theresa Schweig & Rafaële J. C. Huntjens
2. Looking at the past through a telescope: adults postdated their earliest childhood memories
Qi Wang, Carole Peterson, Angel Khuu, Carissa P. Reid, Kayleigh L. Maxwell & Julia M. Vincent
3. Consistency of adults’ earliest memories across two years
Berivan Ece, Burcu Demiray & Sami Gülgöz
4. Thirty-five-month-old children have spontaneous memories despite change of context for retrieval
Trine Sonne, Osman S. Kingo, Dorthe Berntsen & Peter Krøjgaard
5. What happened in kindergarten? Mother-child conversations about life story chapters
Michelle D. Leichtman, Kristina L. Steiner, Kaitlin A. Camilleri, David B. Pillemer & Dorthe Kirkegaard Thomsen
6. Predictors of age-related and individual variability in autobiographical memory in childhood
Patricia J. Bauer & Marina Larkina
7. Origins of adolescents’ earliest memories
Elaine Reese & Sarah-Jane Robertson
8. Recollection improves with age: children’s and adults’ accounts of their childhood experiences
Karen Tustin & Harlene Hayne
9. The relationship between sociocultural factors and autobiographical memories from childhood: the role of formal schooling
Manuel L. de la Mata, Andrés Santamaría, Eva Mª Trigo, Mercedes Cubero, Samuel Arias-Sánchez, Radka Antalíková, Tia G.B. Hansen & Marcia L. Ruiz
10. Unravelling the nature of early (autobiographical) memory
Mark L. Howe
Biography
Qi Wang is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. Her research examines individual and cultural mechanisms underlying autobiographical memory. She is the author of The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture.
Sami Gülgöz is Professor of Psychology at Koç University. His past work includes topics varying from text processing to personality. In the last decade, he has concentrated on memory in everyday life, primarily autobiographical memory.
