Children of Memory

Transcription

>>Nora Episodic memory is your memory for episodes in your life. So very specific, autobiographical moments. It's always been a mystery why it is that children who are in their first two years of life are learning about the world. They are learning the word banana, for instance, and yet we don't remember events from our lives before the age of two. So I wanted to explain both why we seem to forget all of the events of our lives between zero and two despite the fact that we're learning as I said words and lots of facts about the world and then why between the age of two and six um our memories are more fragmented than they later will be. >>Student Look at all these containers. Do you want to open them and let's see if any of them have any toys inside. Which one do you want to open first? >>Nora So we came up with this procedure where kids go to two different rooms, with two different experimentors and those rooms look a bit different: they're described differently. One has clouds on the door, one has rainbows on the door, but in those rooms are four containers. The same four containers in the one room as in the other room, but the containers are also arranged differently. So there are many cues where the child knows okay now I'm in this room, now I'm in that room and they also are shown a specific toy in one of the containers. Let's say it's a turquoise shopping bag in one of the rooms and the other three containers contain nothing. So the question is whether they remember which is the good bag in the cloud room and which is the good bag in the rainbow room. The very youngest children couldn't remember which container contained the toy even when we cued them in a very supportive way, which is we gave them part of the toy. So if you give those bubble juice things you use a wand and you blow bubbles if you give them a wand and you say where's the bubble juice, they don't know. No suppose you don't give them the bubble wand. Now it's a little harder, now the two year olds can't do it. The three year olds can't really do it. The four year olds get a little bit better and we documented a gradual progression. It's not really until the age of five that children top this out. >>Student Can you remember where our toy was in here? Was it there? Let's see. Oh my goodness. There they are. >>Nora The part of everyday life that it relates to is that it's actually very important to social interaction, to be able to remember these kinds of experiences. So for instance if your mother wants to know about your day in school, it's important to her whether or not you played with your friend Penny, whether or not you did well on your spelling test, those kinds of things and in fact, your parents are probably going to be a little dismayed if you can't remember if Penny was in school today or if you don't answer about did you like your peanut butter sandwich and these kinds of things. So, it is very important to coordinating our social experience to be able to have episodic memory.