Strategies for Dating Earliest Memories

• In Event: 1-164 - Your First Memory may be Earlier than we Thought: Evidence from Retrieval and Cohort Effects

Integrative Statement

The questions addressed are: How do people decide when their earliest childhood events occurred? What strategies do they use? Does strategy use vary between samples of participants with different characteristics? How helpful are different strategies? What are some forensic and clinical implications?

An event’s temporal information is typically reconstructed. For late adolescents and emerging adults, making inferences about the timing of childhood events can be challenging given the passage of time that renders early memories fragmentary. The strategies they use may be important for dating accuracy. In contrast, parental dating estimates should be more accurate because events in their children’s childhood occurred after their own temporal and memory skills became well developed, and the target events were likely to have occurred during a period of their lives that had high salience.

Prior research has determined that late adolescents and emerging adults typically postdated memories from before 48 months (Wang et al., in press). Here, we analyzed the strategies they used (Table 1) to locate memories in time by asking them to ‘think aloud’ when dating memories, and expected Landmarks to be both frequent and most successful. We then compared their dating estimates with those of their parents.

The two samples differed considerably in strategy use (Table 2). The Canadian sample primarily used only one strategy, and the maximum was three (mean = 1.3). Their most common strategy was Seasons, then Landmarks, School Year, and Special Occasions. In contrast, the U.S. sample seldom used only one strategy, but instead over 40% used more than 4 and up to 8 (mean = 3.3). Their most common strategy was Location, then Family Information, Season, and Landmarks. The rare versus heavy use of Location in the samples likely reflects differences in population mobility. Other strategy use differences may be related to contrasts between highly homogeneous versus heterogeneous samples.

We also assessed strategy effectiveness, in terms of agreement between participant and parental dates. Overall, most strategies were singularly useless. However, there were two exceptions: Landmarks (fixed known temporal reference points) as well as School Year (only for memories from after age 48 months) were associated with increased dating accuracy, but only for participants from the Canadian sample. None of the strategies were effective for the American sample. Possibly, by using so many strategies, different strategies may have suggested different memory dates, which created interference.

These findings are the first to explore memory dating strategies for earliest memories. Two conclusions are warranted: First, most strategies are highly ineffective. This means that one can have only limited confidence in the temporal location of an event if one only has the recaller’s dating to go by. Memories from one’s early years sometimes play key roles in forensic, clinical, and social services investigations, and placing undue credence on dating information may lead to unfortunate consequences. This study also highlights questions about variation between individuals and sampled groups of participants. The question of why people are so poor at dating memories remains an important one.

Authors

• Carole Peterson, Memorial University of Newfoundland
  Presenting Author

• Qi Wang, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author