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paradigm shift
May. 10th, 2005 11:40 amSince I spent the previous post correcting the misconceptions of others, I thought I'd share one that I just got fixed on Friday.
So there's this phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. A baby, or a toddler, obviously has long-term memory. She recognizes her parents, or even people she hasn't seen in a while, remembers what she did the last time she was with them, can tell you what she did yesterday (once she can talk), and so on. However, once you get a little older, some sort of curtain seems to fall. Your "first memory" is somewhere between 3 and 5, sometimes a little later. You can no longer remember the things about being 2 that you could remember at 2-and-a-half.
The (speculative) explanation that I'd always heard was that around this time, your language skills get good enough that you start thinking verbally, and encoding your memories linguistically--and this mode of thought is so different from the previous one that you can't access the old memories. Creepy, huh? But it fits in with what we know about state-dependent memory. It's harder for you to access happy memories when you're sad, even though that's a much less dramatic difference.
So I was at a conference on Friday, having dinner with some fellow memory folks, and talking to someone who works with kids about cross-cultural differences. She mentioned, casually, that infantile amnesia ends an average of 2 years later in China. First memories tend to show up in the 5- to 7-year-old range. Language is learned within the same time frame in both America and China, so this completely destroys the idea that the amnesia is related to lack of linguistic skill. My first reaction, of course, was WTF?
A tangent here, so that the explanation makes sense: America is more-or-less an individualist culture. That means we see the person as the basic unit, one that relates to others but acts and thinks on its own. We value standing out, "finding yourself," and personal achievement. China is what's refered to as a collectivist culture. Collectivist cultures see the group as the basic unit, and action and decision-making as things that happen through cooperation and interaction. They value harmony and the prioritization of group goals over one's own.
So an American child comes home from a trip out with grandma, and gets asked: "Where did you go? Oh, you went to the zoo? What did you see? Did you feed the elephant?" The Chinese child is much less likely to be asked this type of question. The issue isn't linguistic skill, but practice creating personal narratives for others. In other words, the reason the individualist culture has the earlier memory is because of the interactions the child has with others!
This is the coolest thing I've heard in ages. I am such a geek.
So there's this phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. A baby, or a toddler, obviously has long-term memory. She recognizes her parents, or even people she hasn't seen in a while, remembers what she did the last time she was with them, can tell you what she did yesterday (once she can talk), and so on. However, once you get a little older, some sort of curtain seems to fall. Your "first memory" is somewhere between 3 and 5, sometimes a little later. You can no longer remember the things about being 2 that you could remember at 2-and-a-half.
The (speculative) explanation that I'd always heard was that around this time, your language skills get good enough that you start thinking verbally, and encoding your memories linguistically--and this mode of thought is so different from the previous one that you can't access the old memories. Creepy, huh? But it fits in with what we know about state-dependent memory. It's harder for you to access happy memories when you're sad, even though that's a much less dramatic difference.
So I was at a conference on Friday, having dinner with some fellow memory folks, and talking to someone who works with kids about cross-cultural differences. She mentioned, casually, that infantile amnesia ends an average of 2 years later in China. First memories tend to show up in the 5- to 7-year-old range. Language is learned within the same time frame in both America and China, so this completely destroys the idea that the amnesia is related to lack of linguistic skill. My first reaction, of course, was WTF?
A tangent here, so that the explanation makes sense: America is more-or-less an individualist culture. That means we see the person as the basic unit, one that relates to others but acts and thinks on its own. We value standing out, "finding yourself," and personal achievement. China is what's refered to as a collectivist culture. Collectivist cultures see the group as the basic unit, and action and decision-making as things that happen through cooperation and interaction. They value harmony and the prioritization of group goals over one's own.
So an American child comes home from a trip out with grandma, and gets asked: "Where did you go? Oh, you went to the zoo? What did you see? Did you feed the elephant?" The Chinese child is much less likely to be asked this type of question. The issue isn't linguistic skill, but practice creating personal narratives for others. In other words, the reason the individualist culture has the earlier memory is because of the interactions the child has with others!
This is the coolest thing I've heard in ages. I am such a geek.
