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About MARIAL MARIAL in the News Theories on kids, memory debated 'Amnesia' erases childhood event Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday, September 23, 2004 By Jeff Nesmith - Cox Washington Bureau
Since the days of Sigmund Freud, psychologists have debated the origin of "childhood amnesia," the inability of adults to recall events from early childhood. Although they agree that a barrier seems to exist in the early part of a person's autobiographical memory --- the defining personal narrative everyone maintains of his or her life --- they do not agree about its causes. Now theorists Robyn Fivush of Emory University and Katherine Nelson of the City University of New York say the wrong questions have been asked. Instead of debating the cause of the childhood memory barrier, psychologists should try to explain why autobiographical memory exists at all, Fivush and Nelson say in an article in the September issue of Psychological Science. The answer, they suggest, is a confluence of events, including brain development, learning language and verbal interaction with adults, especially one's mother. Autobiographical memory starts to become a coherent life account for most people sometime during the fifth year. Some people can remember events that happened before they were 2 years old. But even for these people, memories appear to be scattered and sparse, rather than part of a coherent autobiography. Not surprisingly, tests show that remembering past events is consistently more difficult with increased distance from the event, Fivush said. But events from some early age, usually around 5 or 6, become much harder to recall than the distance in time would explain, she said. This is the phenomenon that psychologists have termed childhood amnesia. Freud's explanation was that a human being's earliest experiences were dominated by thoughts and impulses that are socially unacceptable, such as animalistic violence or having sex with his or her parent. Therefore, when the child becomes socialized and learns what is acceptable, the brain represses these painful and frightening thoughts. Other scientists have argued that some different barrier must be crossed before a child can begin to construct autobiographical memory. "In contrast, we propose that what is in need of explanation is the presence of autobiographical memories at all," Fivush and Nelson wrote. "How and why do humans have autobiographical memory, and what is the process by which it develops?" Fivush, Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of psychology at Emory, said psychologists distinguish between "episodic memory" of events in one's own life and "semantic memory" of facts. Almost all Americans can "remember" that George Washington was the first president, but few may be able to remember the event at which they learned that fact. For a coherent personal narrative to begin to be formed, she said, a child must have mastered a language around which to arrange events. This means the language is not merely a code for storing the memories, but a "scaffold" around which memory is constructed. Then, with the ability to use language, a child interacts with adults and begins to discover his or her own "story."
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