Earliest Memories and Recent Memories of Highly Salient Events—Are They Similar?

Abstract

Four- to 11-year-old children were interviewed about 2 different sorts of memories in the same home visit: recent memories of highly salient and stressful events—namely, injuries serious enough to require hospital emergency room treatment—and their earliest memories. Injury memories were scored for amount of unique information, completeness vis-à-vis a standardized injury prototype, and accuracy. Earliest memories were scored for amount of unique information, how old children had been at the time of their earliest memory, and time between their earliest memory and current age. Correlational and regression analyses showed that the 2 types of memory reports demonstrated considerable similarity in terms of unique information and completeness. Specifically, children with the most informative earliest memories had more informative as well as more complete free recalls of injury events. Such relationships between both sorts of memories suggest similar underlying processes at work when children produce memory reports, even when the length, structure, coherence, and content of those memories is about as divergent as one can imagine.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This manuscript is based on subsets of data used in prior reports about children's memories about injuries and their earliest memories. We extend our thanks to the Janeway Hospital and its emergency room staff and to all the recruiters, interviewers, transcribers, and data analyzers who participated in obtaining the data used in this report. We also thank Penny Voutier for myriad helpfulness and Lynne Baker-Ward for valuable discussions that have enriched this report.