Darryl Bruce

Fragment memories mark the end of childhood amnesia

Adults described and dated two kinds of first remembrances: a personal event memory (the recollection of a personal episode that had occurred at some time in some place) and a memory fragment (an isolated memory moment having no event context and remembered, perhaps, as an image, a behavior, or an emotion). First fragment memories were judged to have originated substantially earlier in life than first event memories—approximately 3 1/3 years of age for first fragment memories versus roughly 4 years of age for first event memories. We conclude that the end of childhood amnesia is marked not by our earliest episodic memories, but by the earliest remembered fragments of childhood experiences.

Remembering Deese’s 1959 articles: The Zeitgeist, the sociology of science, and false memories

Two contemporaneous reports by J. Deese—one concerned with correct recall (1959a), the other with recall intrusions (1959b)-have differed dramatically in their citations to date. The differences represent an unusually compelling instance of the operation of the scientific Zeitgeist. The article dealing with correct recall was congruent with the Zeitgeist of memory research when it was published. Hence it flourished. Just the opposite was true of the article on intrusions, which by the mid 1970s had gone into eclipse. A markedly different Zeitgeist in the 1990s, however, led two investigators simultaneously and independently to adapt Deese’s intrusion method to the investigation of false memories.

Encoding context and false recognition memories

False recognition of an extralist word that is thematically related to all words of a study list may reflect internal activation of the theme word during encoding followed by impaired source monitoring at retrieval, that is, difficulty in determining whether the word had actually been experienced or merely thought of. To assist source monitoring, distinctive visual or verbal contexts were added to study words at input. Both types of context produced similar effects: False alarms to theme‐word (critical) lures were reduced; remember judgements of critical lures called old were lower; and if contextual information had been added to lists, subjects indicated as much for list items and associated critical foils identified as old. The visual and verbal contexts used in the present studies were held to disrupt semantic categorisation of list words at input and to facilitate source monitoring at output.

The correspondence metaphor: Prescriptive or descriptive?

Koriat & Goldsmiths abstract correspondence metaphor is unlikely to prove useful to memory science. It aims to motivate and inform the investigation of everyday memory, but that movement has prospered without it. The irrelevance of its competitor – the more concrete storehouse metaphor – as a guiding force in memory research presages a similar fate for the correspondence perspective.