Too much thinking. Again.

Between what I could not help but keep thinking was extraneous, redundant, and unnecessary evidence presented in “The Emergence of Autobiographical Memory : A Social Cultural Developmental Theory” by Kavush and Nelson, I kept finding points that opened up a whole new view of the article for me – one that I found, if slightly off-topic and idealistic, nonetheless extremely important. What I saw throughout their description of the development of the entity of autobiographical memory was a description that could almost simultaneously describe the development of personality. At the risk of possibly sounding slightly Freudian (though that may not be all bad?), I’ll point out some specifics that I found especially indicative of this. The first point in the reading at which this idea began forming in my mind was their discussion of childrens’ constructions of memories and concepts based on the “scaffolding” of these events by the adults (mainly mothers) around them. With memory in all its types being, more or less, the absolute most important component of the life of any human being, any event which is encoded in the mind of someone at the time when the memory is still in stages of the development that are not yet autonoetic but simply essential to functioning (as in, of course, a child) is going to hold extreme significance. As something that I can actually recall and relate to personally, the reinforcement of adults to children of the validity and correctness of the child’s recounting of an episode is just as important to the memory process as any other factor, and even more important to the later development of individual personality characteristics. As a theory: a child who does have their accounts and memories reinforced by their parents and other adults adapt a sense of self-confidence, even if it is not articulated as such at the time, and in accordance with the theory of autobiographical memory being a memory for important and life-defining events, this self confidence then has more potential at that time, in that instance, than it would at perhaps in a later point in the child’s development, to become salient in his/her personalities. Of course, I also do not mean this to sound like an over-simplification, either; the personality aspect of self-confidence was my main focus in the course of this reading because, in the way that I read this, it was alluded to, often, whether the authors intended for this or not. They even mentioned at one point that “’achievement of a cognitive self,’…is also characterized by a new self-consciousness, evidenced in inhibition, shyness, and embarrassment.” Also, the development of the component of autobiographical memory that is the ability of a child to see his or her own perspective in relation to those of others can also, again, by my theory, be a definite precursor for the natural characteristic tendency of all humans – to compare his or herself to others. And this idea brings me to the actual questions I wish to address based on all of these crazy observations – what makes some children eventually come to manifest these tendencies, and coinciding insecurities, more so than others? Is it whether or not the mother was elaborative or non-elaborative in the course of the child’s development, forcing the child not only have a somewhat lesser developed (at least at the time) memory in the case of the latter but also be at a loss for comparability by which to validate the things he or she remembers? (And, as another tangent, will this influence the level of creativity possessed by a child eventually? Will the child be more prone to self-doubt and subsequent confabulation and alternate forms of expression if their memories and ideas are not readily, or ever, confirmed by adults [assuming that if they were, they would develop more stringent ideas and concepts of the world, or at least be more apt to doing so]?) If the individual outcomes of autobiographical memory development truly is so dependent on social contexts, then why do children from the same families and upbringings so often turn out so differently, in many respects at that? Does it have to do with intelligence? And if so, in the correlation of memory and intelligence, what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Referring to the experimental task of toddlers needing a key to open a box, “Children who did not verbally recall this causal connection even when probed also did not evidence behavioral reenactment of the causal connection, being surprised when they could not open the box at the end of the event sequence.” At that age, is there any other way to measure intelligence than by memory? My questions are admittedly vague and scattered, but all this seeming circumlocution is, hopefully, pointing to my idea that there is much more that can be learned – and, more importantly, predicted – from the development of autobiographical memory than we may realize. Personality may be able to be evaluated even in the earliest stages of life. I may seem to be just further blurring already vague, scattered, and still developing realms of thought, but that seems to me to be utterly necessary. “Whereas memory for specific episodes is important for anticipating and predicting the environment autobiographical memory, as defined here, is about defining self in time and in relation to others.” That statement seems far too black-and-white to me. Are not all episodes remembered for a reason, an emotional reason, no matter how implicit?

Another observation I had, which is, I promise, less far-reaching and much less long-winded, is the author’s treatment of the retrieval of the very first memories of life. Within the text itself, there seems to be a very significant contradiction. It is empirically stated in the analysis of one of the authors’ experiments that children’s recounts of certain events, when they are prompted by interviewers to give them at several different intervals spread over months and even years, will consistently still utilize only the vocabulary that the children had at the time of the initial recount, even though their vocabulary has clearly developed immensely since that time. So with this in mind, how much faith can we put in the first memories at ALL? There was little or no language in the mental construct of all persons at the time that this first “memory” was “made”, so how can any later, especially adulthood representation or conveyance of this “memory” even qualify as a memory at all? It is at best misrepresented or exaggerated, and at worst completely confabulated. In the context of the role of language in autobiographical memory, I cannot see any way around this. The authors actually do seem to almost reach this conclusion, by stating that “the first recalled memory does not imply a now continuous autobiographical memory”, but do not explain why. I was only satisfied when I went on to read Howe and Courage, and found that my feelings on this topic were valid: they make clear that, if in either case that they propose for the reason behind infantile amnesia, the first memories are either irretrievable (if memory is in fact permanent) because the context of the initial encoding is too vastly different from the context of the attempt at retrieval, or the mental state of the person at the time did not support the memory being significantly encoded (if memory is not permanent) because, due to the massive and rapid attempts of the minds of infants and young children to instinctively take in every bit of information they can, there was simply not enough time and enough cognitive ability available. Yes, Howe and Courage. Yes.
And yet, the focus of their article was still not entirely what I was hyped up for. Infantile amnesia is a fascinating phenomenon, but when studying it simply in and of itself, and paying equal or less attention to what is actually remembered throughout these years, where are we getting? Not far. I’m open to and ready for much questioning and arguing (and probably general confusion) relating to all these observations, but in hopes of at least giving us all a place to start, let me sum up the above garrulous rambling into a single sentence: As long as both concepts are still present in every analysis, let’s focus less on what is forgotten and more on what is remembered.