Scary stories

A few weeks ago, I spoke to Laura Kelly from The Big Issue in Scotland about modernising influences on children's fairy tales. You can read the article here. 

Children in the camcorder's eye

I'll be at the British Library on Tuesday, talking about how digital technologies help in our understanding of children's minds, and what the costs and benefits are for children themselves. In an earlier post, I talked about how the selectivity of the video record might lead children to mistrust memories for which they don't have documentary evidence. If recent posts are anything to go by, they would be right to mistrust those memories. The point is that this is one respect in which adults have an obvious part to play in shaping children's autobiographical narratives, through those sometimes thought-through, sometimes haphazard decisions to record this and leave the camcorder switched off for that. 

I'll also be talking about how digital technologies can bring us closer to the small child's point of view. Here, I'll be developing a theme from the 'Lightning Ridge is Falling Down' chapter, in which I describe Athena's early attempts at movie-making. In preparation, I have this afternoon been going through some of the video clips she took when she was two. Oh, that Aussie accent. I found the clip I mention in the book, in which she is videoing the courtesy light in the roof of our Toyota Camry. When she wants to check if the camcorder is switched on, she puts the whole thing down on her lap and inspects it all over. The machine keeps running, filming the weave of her orange trousers and the canvas of its own strap. Her fingers are all over the lens, and I'm sure the whole thing falls to the floor at one point. How offhand she is with her technological eye on the world, and how poignant the digital record. 

Michael's memory

It's clear enough that most adults do not have accurate memories for events from toddlerhood and infancy. But do small children recall their own earlier childhoods? If you ask the questions early enough, do you find evidence for remembering that would usually not survive the amnesia of the early years? 

This question is at the heart of an intriguing case study just published in the journal Infant and Child Development. The author, the developmental psychologist and therapist Aletha Solter, had been working with the family of a little boy, Michael, who at the age of five months had had a short stay in hospital while he underwent cranial surgery. The therapy he was receiving was aimed at relieving the behavioural symptoms of traumatization. Michael had had no further experience of hospitals since his stay as a baby. Solter took advantage of this fact in planning a study of Michael's memory for his time in hospital. Crucially, she also asked Michael's family not to discuss his hospital stay with him. 

Solter then conducted two follow-up interviews in which she asked Michael about his memory for the event. The first interview, which took place when Michael was 29 months old, showed him to have some strikingly detailed memories of his stay in hospital two years before. He recalled that his eyes had been closed for a time (as a result of the surgery), that the nurse had been wearing a red blouse and scarf, and that his grandfather had sung the carol 'Silent Night'.

At the second interview, conducted when Michael was 40 months, the picture was very different. This time, the little boy appeared to have no memory of his time as an in-patient. When Solter prompted him about the details he had recalled a year before, he had entirely forgotten them. As a two-year-old, Michael had limited but detailed and accurate memories of this event from his infancy. At three, those memories had vanished. 

These findings are intriguing for a number of reasons, but not least because they demonstrate that 29-month-old Michael was able to use language to describe events for which he would not have had the relevant language at the time. Although he is noted to be a verbally precocious child, at the age of five months he would presumably have had no language at all. Solter notes some other studies that have shown that children can later apply verbal labels to preverbal experiences. For example, the researchers Gwynn Morris and Lynne Baker-Ward showed two-year-old children an event (the activation of an interesting bubble-making machine) that was critically related to colour (only a particular colour of bubble soap activated the machine). Children who did not have colour words at the time of the event were then, over a period of two months, given instruction in using colour words. When they were tested for recall of the original event, a significant percentage of children who did not have colour words at the time of the event nevertheless used their new colour labels in recalling what had happened. 

The weight of the evidence, though, points to very limited verbal access to preverbal memories. A major force behind childhood amnesia is undoubtedly that children are trying to relate in language events that happened before they had language. What Michael's case shows is that there might be a sensitive period for access to such memories. If your language is good enough in that period between about 2 and 3 years of age, you might be able to gain verbal access to traumatic memories for events in early infancy. Most children, though, are not as verbally precocious as Michael is reported to be. For them, the horrors (and joys) of infancy are lost for ever. 

Running from the Spider-Baby

I've talked a bit about children's ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. One much-loved child in the shape of an adult is Father Dougal McGuire, who was on our screens last night in a New Year Father Ted special. In the very first episode, entitled 'Good Luck, Father Ted', Dougal tells Ted about a funfair that is coming to Craggy Island. He tries to persuade him that one of the main attractions is a strange hybrid called the Spider-Baby. On cross-examination, it becomes clear that Dougal is confused about the provenance of this idea. You can watch what follows here. 

Dougal is like a toddler in so many ways. But are toddlers' qualities (I would hate to call them failings or weaknesses) in this respect best described as a confusion between fantasy and reality? In an earlier post, I mentioned how we have tried to reformulate this question as involving a distinction between internally generated and externally generated events. Father Ted's instructional diagram illustrates this quite nicely. What Dougal has to do is distinguish between the products of his own mind—the dream he has had—and the workings of external reality. His mix-up gives life to the Spider-Baby, and made us laugh on a cold night as well. 

Trusting early memories

One group of people who need to know about children's minds are those who deal with them in a legal capacity. Among other things, lawyers, judges and law enforcers need to understand about young people's capacity to give consent, how they respond to the social context of questioning, and how they represent past events about which they might be asked to testify.

The British Psychological Society recently published a set of guidelines on the topic of the law and human memory. The report, authored by a working party chaired by Martin Conway, considers the legal implications of recent findings on memory and forgetting. When children are involved in the legal process, such as in situations involving abuse, cases can hang on the accuracy of a child's memory. And yet those in the legal professions rarely take research on memory into their reckoning, preferring instead to rely on expert witnesses to vouch for the reliability or otherwise of participants' recollections.

There are some thorny problems here, and the report demands to be read and weighed carefully. One point made by the authors stood out for me in particular. On the basis of a great deal of research, the authors explicitly caution against comparisons between human memory and mechanical recording media such as video tapes. But these are errors that are still widespread. The writer Hilary Mantel, for example, in her acclaimed memoir Giving Up The Ghost (Fourth Estate, 2003), puts it like this:

"Though my early memories are patchy, I think they are not, or not entirely a confabulation, and I believe this because of their overwhelming sensory power [...] As I say 'I tasted,' I taste, and as I say 'I heard,' I hear: I am not talking about a Proustian moment, but a Proustian cine-film. Anyone can run these ancient newsreels, with a bit of preparation..."

For Mantel, the vividness of her memories is the guarantee of their accuracy. Decades of research into autobiographical memory show that this is simply wrong. Indeed, the BPS report specifically warns against trusting memories just because they have vivid sensory properties. Memory is too much a tale of storytelling. The only true guide to the accuracy of memories is, ultimately, independent corroboration.

You can download the BPS report here.

Around the table

Developmental psychologists like their laboratories and their experimental tasks, but they also recognise that many of the complexities of children's development only reveal themselves amid the noise of everyday life. In their search for naturalistic contexts for their observations, those who study children's minds have often seen the value of family mealtimes. Mealtimes follow pretty set scripts; they keep energetic toddlers in the same place for a few minutes at a time; and they involve all sorts of verbal and nonverbal communication. As well as using the family dining table as a context within which to observe children directly, psychologists have also studied the effects of exposure to these particularly important social routines.

The latest Social Policy Report Brief from the Society for Research in Child Development summarises some of these findings and calls for their wider dissemination. Eating together is linked to vocabulary growth and academic achievement in younger children, and is associated with lower rates of behaviour problems. There are benefits in terms of avoiding obesity and eating disorders. Teenagers who eat with the family five or more times a week are protected against the temptations of nicotine, marijuana and alcohol. Shared meals tend to be healthier, and teenagers who enjoy them get through more fruit and vegetables. 

All this, when the average American family mealtime lasts about twenty minutes. For this important context for development, even a short exposure seems to make a big difference. 

You can download the Brief here. 

Is he nearly here yet?

Isaac can't wait. Today is Christmas Eve, which means that tonight Santa Claus will come down the chimney and 'drink some of that special wine that he likes'.

'Single malt whisky,' I correct him. 

'I'm so excited,' he says. 'I want him to come now.'

I wrote about children's perception of time in the book. In the chapter entitled 'The Young Doctor Who', I describe some experiments conducted by my colleague Teresa McCormack. Children were shown a picture of an owl called Barney and listened to the sound Barney made (a tone lasting half a second). They then heard some sounds (each of differing lengths) made by other owls, followed by some test trials in which they had to judge whether the sound they were hearing was Barney's sound (the half-second one):

Five-year-olds (the youngest children tested so far) tend to claim that sounds shorter than half a second are Barney’s sound: that is, children remember the tone as being shorter than it was in reality. It is as though their own internal clocks are running too fast, causing them to judge that time is passing more quickly than it really is. Those children who pester their parents with pleas of ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ may simply have speeded-up body clocks. Appealing to concrete intervals measured in conventional units of time (‘We’ll be there in half an hour’) is no solution, since a five-year-old’s half an hour is quite a bit shorter than that of the person behind the wheel.

The historian of psychology Douwe Draaisma also considers some distortions of time perception, but focusing on the other end of the life span. In his book Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older (see the books carousel at the bottom of this page), he considers how the pressures on time perception in old age might work in the opposite direction. The wheels that measure time turn more slowly (perhaps because of a reduced rate of metabolism), and so the years fly by. 

Draaisma also quotes that other great psychologist of time, Marcel Proust. In The Guermantes Way, Marcel can think of nothing other than his forthcoming appointment with Mme de Stermaria: 

For as a general rule, the shorter the interval is that separates us from our planned objective, the longer it seems to us, because we apply to it a more minute scale of measurement, or simply because it occurs to us to measure it at all.

So it is with Isaac and Santa. If he had other things to distract him, the hours might not drag so. If he were eighty years old, the day would fly by. But he is five, and in for a excitable, dragging wait. It is going to be a long day. 

Happy Christmas to all. I hope you'll drop by again in the New Year.