Transcript amnesia12

Childhood amnesia, language and
thought?
Reflections on Simcock & Hayne
(2002)
Why should we be interested in
childhood amnesia in a language
class?
• Review types and processes of memory
• examine the idea of “representation”
• Representation may be in modalities
– Propositions/mentalese
– Language (English, Pirahan…)
– Visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory images
• Memory “stores” representations
• Examine role of language in memory
– Encoding, retrieval, filing system, ???
– Translation among modalities
– Making thought conscious-- (when possible?)
Relate to the sign language
cases?
• Cases of later sign acquisition
– Ballard (James)
– Ildephonso (Pinker)
– NSL teacher in Kegl video
• Have a common themes of
– Ability to translate prior memories into sign
– Extolling the newly acquired system
– In some cases attributing greater powers of thought to it
Encoding into memory
Amnesia
The loss of memory or memory
abilities
Childhood
amnesia
Review of memory
Causes of memory loss
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Injury or damage to brain
Changes in normal aging
Disease
Psychogenic memory loss
Childhood amnesia
And of course, inadequate encoding can
lead to memory failure.
Injury or damage to specific area
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Head trauma
Stroke
Surgery
Chemical (including drugs, alcohol , e.g.
Korsakoff’s syndrome)
• Electric shock
– (ECT may induce retro- and antergrade
amnesia)
Possible effects of brain injury on memory
H.M’s case
• Surgery on medial temporal lobes including
the hippocampus to eliminate epileptic
seizures at age 27 (“bilateral surgery”)
• Immediate STM seemed normal
• Preserved semantic memory but lost
previous 11 years events
• No new long-term memories apparently
formed -- hence “anterograde amnesia”
• Later research showed certain implicit LTM
memories were formed.
H.M.’s anterograde amnesia
Hippocampus views 1
Hippocampus views 2
HM’s lesions
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Kensinger EA, Ullman MT, and Corkin S (2001). Bilateral medial temporal lobe damage does not affect
lexical or grammatical processing: Evidence from amnesic patient H.M. Hippocampus, 11, 347-360.
Comments on HM’s surgery
• Clearly not all medial temporal lobe
structures have been removed; nor is are the
lesions totally symmetrical.
• It is likely the right and left lobes normally
function differently.
Normal aging
• Moderate loss in some individuals,
especially on names
• Causes include general health issues, e.g.
CV issues, and cell loss
• Extreme cases may be described as “senile
dementia”
Aging dendrites
Alzheimer’s disease and memory
loss
• AD is typically a progressive disease of
older people moving from barely notable
forgetting to major loss of factual and even
procedural memory -• How to brush teeth
• How to comb hair
Alzheimer’s example
QuickT ime™ and a Video decompressor are needed to see this picture.
Psychological causes of memory loss
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Hypnotic
Hysteria/fugue
Stress induced cases
Repression?
And of course normal causes -- interference,
decay…..
Childhood amnesia
• Few have episodic (i. e. event or
autobiographical) memories before three
years
• Not likely to be due to Freudian
“repression”
• Just a fact of brain development?
• No language related structures yet?
Review of memory
• Classification of memory types including an
indication of significant brain structures
involved. (This is not meant to be
complete.)
“working memory”- what is it?
• A scratchpad- phonological loop, visual,
episodic??
• Holds representations for processing
• Focus of attention?
• LTM memory “nodes” that are “activated”?
Working memory- one sketch
Freud on childhood amnesia
• "We conclude therefor that we do not deal
with a real forgetting of infantile
impressions but rather with an amnesia
similar to that observed in neurotics for later
experiences, the nature of which consists in
their being kept away from consciousness
(repression). But what forces bring about
this repression of the infantile expressions?
He who can solve this riddle will also
explain hysterical amnesia.
Freud (continued)
. We may say that without infantile amnesia there
would be no hysterical amnesia
• I therefore believe that the infantile amnesia which
causes the individual to look upon his childhood
as if it were a prehistoric time and conceals from
him the beginning of his own sexual life -- that
this amnesia, is responsible for the fact that one
does not usually attribute any value to the infantile
period in the development of the sexual life. P.582
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Freud, S. (Ed.). (1938). Three contributions to
the theory of sex: II Infantile sexuality. New York:
The Modern Library.
Neither Freud nor modern versions of
“repressed memory” notions have much
empirical support
Is language development responsible
for the end of childhood amnesia?
• There's an obvious correlation between
childhood memories and language skill.
• Conversations about the past enhance
memory for autobiographical facts
• Children's ability to use another person's (or self?)
language to cue retrieval of their own memory
increases the probability that retrieval will occur
• Encoding specificity suggests verbally directed
recall will miss memories in non-verbal codes -unless those memories are "translated" into words.
What’s encoding specificity?
• Its why you might remember something better in
the place or other circumstances where you first
encountered that something.
• Professor Tulving (1982-3) said
– The probability of successful retrieval of the target item
is a montonically increasing function of informational
overlap between the information present at retrieval and
the information stored in memory.
• Simcock, G., & Hayne, H. (2002).
Breaking the barrier? Children fail to
translate their preverbal memories into
language. Psychological Science, 13,
225-231.
• "The primary goal of the present experiment
was to determine whether or not children
could translate preverbal aspects of their
memory into language once they had
acquired the vocabulary necessary to do
so.”
Preverbal
memory
established
Acquire
relevant
language
Report
preverbal
memory?
Memory evaluation procedure
6 months
Language
evaluation
Seven
shrinking
toy trials
1.verbal test
2.photo
3.action
12 months
Language
evaluation
Results of memory assessment
• Proportion of information retained by age,
mode, and interval shows clear evidence
young (preverbal?) children can have
memories of the “toy” event.
Memory data
Results relating words to memory
• "As shown in Table 3, there was not a single
instance in which a child used a word or
words to describe the event that had not
been part of his or her productive
vocabulary at the time of encoding……they
could not translate the information into
words even though they had acquired the
vocabulary to do so.”
Items remembered
Results overall
• "In short, children's verbal reports of the
event were frozen in time, reflecting their
verbal skill at the time of encoding, rather
than at time of the test….at the time of the
test the children recognized photographs
and performed actions for which they did
not have the relevant vocabulary at the time
of original encoding.
Words in target vocabulary
Conclusions
• "across the entire age range tested, children's
verbal memory performance lagged substantially
behind their nonverbal memory performance.”
• "language development did not render these
perceptually based memories accessible to verbal
recall…
• (in no instance did children report an aspect of the
event that had not been part of their productive
vocabulary at the time of original encoding (Table
3).
• "We hypothesize that the inability to
translate early, preverbal experiences into
language prevents these experiences from
becoming part of autobiographical
memory."230
The end (?)
Follow up: exceptions?
• Morris, G., & Baker-Ward, L. (2007). Fragile
but real: Children's capacity to use newly
acquired words to convey preverbal
memories. Child Development, 78(2), 448458.
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"the apparent limitations in the contexts in which words can be used to report
preverbal experiences indicate that this capacity is fragile..."457
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This study suggests “translation” into new words is very limited but possible for
some children under some circumstances.
More new references
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Peterson, C., Grant, V. V., & Boland, L. D. (2005). Childhood amnesia in children and adolescents: Their
earliest memories. Memory, 13, 622-637.
Rats, too
Richardson, Rick & Hayne, Harlene
You Can't Take It With You: The Translation of Memory Across
Development.
Current Directions in Psychological Science 16 (4), 223-227.
Rats, too (caption)
• Fig. 1. Test of memory development in rats. Rats given pairings
between a conditioned stimulus (CS; in this case, an odor) and an
unconditioned stimulus (US; a shock) at 16 days of age (P16) express
their learned fear of the odor CS when they are tested 24 hours later
through some behaviors (e.g., avoidance, freezing) but not others
(FPS; fear-potentiated startle).
• Rats trained at 22 days of age (P22) and tested 24 hours later express
their learned fear of the odor through all three behaviors.
• The critical finding is that rats trained at 16 days of age and then tested
at 23 days of age (P23) retain the odor–shock association across the 7day interval, but they only express their learned fear through response
systems (i.e., avoidance and freezing) that were mature at the time of
training.
Narrative quantity-accuracy
tradeoff in amnesia too?
• Do better stories make better memories? Narrative
quality and memory accuracy in preschool
children
• Sarah Kulkofsky *, Qi Wang, Stephen J. Ceci
• The present study examines how the quality of
children's narratives relates to the accuracy of
those narratives.
Quantity_accuracy tradeoff?
• Children's narratives were coded for volume,
complexity and cohesion as well as for accuracy.
Correlational results showed that overall, narrative
skills enable the reporting of more information,
while decreasing the proportion of information
that was accurate. These results appeared to be
driven by a quantity-accuracy trade-off; in an
ensuing regression analysis with all narrative
variables entered into the model, volume was
associated with decreases in accuracy while
narrative cohesion was associated with increases
in accuracy.
Encoding into memory
Encoding into memory
Verbal overshadowing - can
language interfere with encoding
or retrieval of non-verbal
memories?
• Fiore, S. M., & Schooler, J. W. (2002).
How did you get here from there?
Verbal overshadowing of spatial mental
models. Applied Cognitive Psychology,
16, 897-910.
HM meets childhood amnesia???
• Both are failures to report previous experiences
• To some extent in either case, this is not indicative
of memory failure itself?
• Crucially, however, kids learn new words, HM
doesn’t!
But many issues left hanging
• HM has some declarative memories of the past.
• What is the extent of confabulation in each case?
• Is HM’s confabulator partially damaged?
(cingulate gyrus??)
• To what extent are lexical processes dissociated? - acquisition and use
it has become clear that one small area of this region, called the dentate gy
dentate gyrus is up to speed, early experiences may never get locked into lo
Hayne agrees that the brain continues to mature over a long period of deve
all and end-all of childhood amnesia.
cannot be explained by brain maturation alone," she says. Clearly, there mu
What's more, there are puzzling cross-cultural differences in the age of ear
Cognition- the big picture
• Thinking is the manipulation of representations
• Several modes of concept representation
• A ‘logical’ system to relate/compute/manipulate
relations among concepts
• Language -- if not one of the modes -- is an
important factor
– Priming
– Autocoding of thoughts into L in fluent users
– Perhaps a means of communication both between
individuals but also within? (hemispheric
specialization)
Overview of kids memory
• As a body, the research on the later verbal
accessibility of early memories supports some general
conclusions as to when we might expect to see verbal
children successfully engage in conversations about
events from early in life. First, if the children were
younger than 20 months at the time of experience,
with high levels of contextual support, they may be
able to report on the event after some months have
passed (i.e. as in Bauer et al., 1998, in which children
16 months of age at the time of experience of
laboratory events spontane- ously talked about those
that they had been permitted to imitate). However,
even with high levels of contextual support, they are