1. Many people report a memory or two from their childhood before the age of 3.
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Question
1. Many people report a memory or two from their childhood before the age of 3. How is this possible (or how is it not possible) given what you know of infantile amnesia in chapter 6? Is there evidence that suggest the "memory" was from another source? Give examples 2. Explain how stress and negative emotions can compromise working memory performance and whether these effects can be reduced through intervention. Secondly, explain why is it important to consider how emotion affects working memory when evaluating an individual's cognitive abilities. Please explain using facts from the text (chapter 5), research and personal experience to elaborate.Explanation / Answer
Infantile amnesia refers to the observation that adults have almost no episodic memories from the first 3 to 5 years of their life. The amnesia in this case relates to the memory of an individual in his/her adulthood and not of children per say. Given that most of us do not remember our childhood, it is unlikely that the unique instances of flashbacks about childhood can be recalled with a very high accuracy. However, this does not mean that people’s accounts of their childhood are completely false. It is likely that the acquire information form others, such as family narratives about their temperament, anecdotal behaviours while growing up,etc which gets registered in their memory as autobiographical memory, that is what they actually experienced. In clinical psychology, recollection of memory of childhood trauma has been a topic of debate. Many researchers use the concept of childhood amnesia to argue that the recollection of past experiences in psychoanalytic psychotherapy is misleading as the patient’s memories are in a way produced by the analysts interpretations and probes about the past. Thus, while it is difficult to own up to one’s past with full accuracy, it does not indicate that people cannot remember their childhood in entirety. We may have vague memories of fleeting scents of our parents clothes, or a favourite food, or our first day in the playground. Vividness of the experience, it’s repetition in th form of retelling, are perhaps better frames of reference for determining what one remembers of the past.
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