Childhood amnesia, language and thought?

1. Childhood amnesia, language and thought? Reflections on Simcock & Hayne (2002)

2. 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?)

3. 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

4. Encoding into memory

6. Amnesia The loss of memory or memory abilities Childhood amnesia

7. Review of memory Classification of memory types including an indication of significant brain structures involved. (This is not meant to be complete.)

8. Causes of memory loss 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.

9. Injury or damage to specific area Head trauma Stroke Surgery Chemical (including drugs, alcohol , e.g. Korsakoff’s syndrome) Electric shock (ECT may induce retro- and antergrade amnesia)

10. Possible effects of brain injury on memory

11. 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.

12. H.M.’s anterograde amnesia

13. Hippocampus views 1

14. Hippocampus views 2

15. HM’s lesions 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.

16. 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.

17. 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” Normal aging

18. Aging dendrites

19. 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

20. Alzheimer’s example

21. Psychological causes of memory loss Hypnotic Hysteria/fugue Stress induced cases Repression? And of course normal causes -- interference, decay…..

22. 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?

23. Review of memory Classification of memory types including an indication of significant brain structures involved. (This is not meant to be complete.)

24. “working memory”- what is it? A scratchpad- phonological loop, visual, episodic?? Holds representations for processing Focus of attention? LTM memory “nodes” that are “activated”?

25. Working memory- one sketch

26. 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.

27. . 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 Freud, S. (Ed.). (1938). Three contributions to the theory of sex: II Infantile sexuality. New York: The Modern Library. Freud (continued)

28. Neither Freud nor modern versions of “repressed memory” notions have much empirical support

29. 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

30. 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.

31. 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.

32. 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.”

33. Preverbal memory established Acquire relevant language Report preverbal memory?

34. Memory evaluation procedure 6 months 1.verbal test 2.photo 3.action Language evaluation Seven shrinking toy trials Language evaluation 12 months

35. 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.

36. Memory data

37. 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.”

38. Items remembered

39. 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.

40. Words in target vocabulary

41. 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).

42. "We hypothesize that the inability to translate early, preverbal experiences into language prevents these experiences from becoming part of autobiographical memory."230

43. The end (?)

44. 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), 448-458. "the apparent limitations in the contexts in which words can be used to report preverbal experiences indicate that this capacity is fragile..."457 This study suggests “translation” into new words is very limited but possible for some children under some circumstances.

45. More new references Peterson, C., Grant, V. V., & Boland, L. D. (2005). Childhood amnesia in children and adolescents: Their earliest memories. Memory, 13, 622-637.

46. 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.

47. 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 7-day interval, but they only express their learned fear through response systems (i.e., avoidance and freezing) that were mature at the time of training.

48. 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.

49. 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.