PSY270H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Secondary Source, Psych, Source-Monitoring Error
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PSY270H1 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Autobiographical memories: memory about ourselves that consists of episodic and semantic memories. Hard to study because hard to verify. Adult can"t recall memories before age of 2. Earliest memories usually disjointed fragments between ages of 2-4. Tend to be related to major life events or transitions. Memories may be from a secondary source. Initially thought to be caused by neurological maturation. But memories occur before hippocampus and pfc fully mature. Rapid hippocampal development could lead to forgetting of early memories. Language development also requirement for autobiographical memories, nonlinguistic memories without narrative form more vulnerable to forgetting. E. g. women have earlier onset of infantile amnesia. Those with stronger linguistic skills at age 3 have more early memories. Children whose mothers use elaborate reminiscence style report earlier memories. Memories encoded in nonverbal form stay that way. Children only remembered items they knew the words for a year. Memories of life events tend to peak in adolescence/early adulthood.
