Remembering Early Childhood: How Much, How, and Why (or Why Not)

In this article, we consider recent research on three questions about people's memories for their early childhood: whether childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, whether implicit memories survive when explicit memories do not, and why early episodic memories are sketchy. The research leads us to form three conclusions. First, we argue that childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, as long as the term is defined clearly. Specifically, people are able to recall parts of their lives from the period between ages 2 and 5 years, but they recall less from that period than from other periods. Second, we conclude that implicit memories from early childhood may be evident even when explicit memories are not, a finding that suggests early experience may affect behavior in ways that people do not consciously recognize. Third, we argue that although young children are well known to be wonderfully efficient learners of semantic information, they have difficulty in either encoding or retrieving the interlinked aspects of events that lend them their autobiographical character. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories of early childhood may be linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex.     

Recognition and attention

Sternberg has suggested that a possible way of achieving identification of degraded stimuli would be to execute “preprocessing” operations prior to recognition. Such operations would have some parallels with the “filtering” operations, suggested by Broadbent and others, for perceptual selection and attention. But when trying, in this paper, to consider how such operations could be implemented, some rather non-trivial problems emerge. Experimentally, these doubts find support in visual selection tasks of quite general character, in that filtering does not appear to take place. It seems, however, that these problems may be successfully overcome by some simple, though implicative, conceptual changes. The main implication is that effective focal attention is rather likely to be achieved through a process that is best described as “context-sensitive” selection.     

Unexceptional spatial memory in an exceptional memorist.

Rajan Mahadevan evidences an exceptional memory for arrays of digits. We tested whether Rajan's spatial memory was likewise exceptional. Eight control Ss and Rajan were instructed to remember the position and orientation of 48 images of common objects shown either to the left or the right of fixation and facing either left or right. Rajan's accuracy for judging whether the position and orientation of these pictures had changed when they were shown in a different sequence was lower than that of control Ss for both judgments. Rajan's exceptional memory capacity apparently does not extend to spatial relations.     

Programming experiments on a TERAK 8510/A microcomputer

In the course of bringing up one’s first experimental microcomputer system, certain standard problems occur that are trivial to the experienced programmer but are great blocks to the novice. In this spirit, some paradigms that were implemented on a TERAK 8510/a microcomputer, and the related problems, are described. Specific topics include some consideration of timing procedures for reaction time experiments and how to handle large text files on small floppy disk systems.     

COGENT: A visual design environment for cognitive modeling

COGENT is a design environment for modeling cognitive processes and systems. It permits psychologists to construct and test information-processing models of cognition based on traditional box-and-arrow diagrams. COGENT provides a graphical model editor, together with a set of standard types of cognitive module based on familiar theoretical constructs from psychological theory. Models are constructed by selecting appropriate box types, connecting them with appropriate communication links, and configuring the various boxes according to the requirements of the investigator. Once a model has been constructed, it may be executed to examine and analyze its behavior.