1. Memory for events Can 1-3 year olds remember specific events?
Need for developing nonverbal measures of recall
“Recall entails retrieving a cognitive stucture, established on the basis of previously encountered information, in the absence of ongoing perceptual support for that experience”
importance of the process of “recollection” of a specific episode (declarative memory (Bauer))
Acting out vs. verbal report

2. Infancy Attentional preference techniques
Visual paired comparison (Fantz)
Visual habituation
Mobile conjugate reinforcement (Rovee-Collier)
Non-declarative memory; operant conditioning; implicit priming type of memory?

3. Declarative memory Elicited imitation as declarative memory
Neurological evidence for later development
Deferred imitation (Meltzoff) of unusual and noncanonical actions
Or sequences of action (recall of temporal order info)
Bauer, p. 136, table
Determinants of long term recall
Enabling vs. arbitrary relations
Repeated experience
Active participation (not necessary, but leads to better recall)
Cues or reminders (verbal reminding)
Elicited imitation as declarative memory
But no verbalization required

4. Verbal accessibility of early memories
Narrativity (temporal order) in elicited imitation and other more classical narrative tasks
Ordering is what develops; not recall
But narrative skills are not measured
After 20 months or so, evidence of verbal accessibility of memories that were encoded 9 to 12 months before
Ability correlated with age and verbal fluency at the first delayed-recall test

5. Howe’s point of view
Memories personal experiences are not possible until the advent of the cognitive self, around the age of 18 to 24 months.
This age is much earlier than that proposed as the age of the earliest memories in other scientific accounts (i.e., infantile amnesia accounts) and much later than that proposed in popular beliefs about early memory.
New data from a cross-sectional and longitudinal study of early memory development and the emergence of the self clearly show the origins of personal memory coincide with the emergence of the early self.
Reese: “primary influence theory”
Other self theories: Infant goals such as attachment & adults goas such as identity differ; thus infantile amnesia

6. Origins vs. course of development
Origin is causally determined by the emergence of a cognitive self
But course of development can be determined by a host of factors such as mother’s reminiscing styles, language development, cultural differences, etc.
Distinctiveness of events might be an important variable, e.g., trauma
Neisser: original encoding (understanding) of the event
Neisser: no single offset age for childhood amnesia; depends on what events are experienced