Culture and Cognitive Development

358
Chapter 9
LINKAGES
What happens to our
memories of infancy?
(a link to Memory)
T
Human Development
LINKAGES
he ability to remember facts, figures,
pictures, and objects improves as we get
Development and Memory
older and more expert at processing
information. But take a minute
learn right now and try to recall anything that happened to you when you were,
by
doing say, one year old. Most people can accurately recall a few memories from age
five or six but remember virtually nothing from before the age of three (Bauer, 2006;
Bruce, Dolan, & Phillips-Grant, 2000).
Psychologists have not yet found a fully satisfactory explanation for this “infantile
amnesia.” Some have suggested that young children lack the memory encoding and
storage processes described in the chapter on memory. Yet children of two or three can
clearly recall experiences that happened weeks or even months earlier (Bauer, 2006).
Others suggest that infantile amnesia occurs because very young children lack a sense
of self. Because they don’t even recognize themselves in the mirror, they may not have
a framework for organizing memories about what happens to them (Howe, 2003).
However, this explanation would hold for only the first two years or so, because after
that children do recognize their own faces and even their taped voices (Legerstee,
Anderson, & Schaffer, 1998).
Another possibility is that early memories, though “present,” are implicit rather than
explicit. As mentioned in the memory chapter, implicit memories form automatically
and can affect our emotions and behavior even when we do not consciously recall them.
However, children’s implicit memories of their early years, like their explicit memories,
are quite limited. One study found that when ten-year-old children were shown photographs of preschool classmates they hadn’t seen in five years, the children had little
implicit or explicit memory of them (Newcombe & Fox, 1994). In contrast, adults can
correctly identify 90 percent of photographs of high-school classmates they have not
seen for thirty years (Bahrick, Bahrick, & Wittlinger, 1975).
Other explanations of infantile amnesia suggest that our early memories are lost
because in early childhood we don’t yet have the language skills to talk about, and thus
solidify, those memories. This possibility was explored in a study in which two- to
three-year-old children played with a machine that supposedly shrunk toys (Simcock
& Hayne, 2002). Six months later, they were asked what they remembered about this
event. If they had not yet developed language at the time they played with the machine,
the children were now able to say little or nothing about the experience. However, most
of these same children could correctly identify pictures of the machine and act out what
they had done with it. It appears that they had memories of the event that could be
recalled nonverbally but not in words. Another possibility is that early experiences tend
to be fused into generalized event representations, such as “going to Grandma’s” or “playing at the beach,” so it becomes difficult to remember any specific event.
Research on hypotheses such as these may someday unravel the mystery of infantile
amnesia (Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Newcombe et al., 2000).
2
Culture and Cognitive Development
To explain cognitive development, Piaget focused on the physical world of objects.
Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (pronounced “vah-GOT-skee”) focused on the social
world of people. He viewed cognitive abilities as the product of cultural history. The
child’s mind, said Vygotsky, grows through contact with other minds. It is through
interaction with parents, teachers, and other representatives of their culture that children acquire the ideas of that culture (Vygotsky, 1991).
Vygotsky’s followers have studied the effects of the social world on children’s cognitive development—especially how participation in social routines affects children’s
developing knowledge of the world (Gauvain, 2001). In Western societies, those routines