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Biomedical subjects

R Fivush

Publications and source records attributed to R Fivush.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Gendered themes in family reminiscing.

Previous research conducted in laboratory settings has shown reliable gender differences in autobiographical memory. However, these studies have primarily focused on structural or emotional aspects of memory narratives told to an unfamiliar experimenter. The present study extends this literature by investigating gender differences in social references and interpersonal themes in parent-child narratives about the past. Participants were 17 white, middle-class children and their mothers and fathers, who were interviewed when children were 40 and 70 months of age. Parent-child narratives about shared activities in the past, as well as narratives about parents' own childhood, were examined. Results indicated that when discussing shared events, both parents talked in similar ways across children, although fathers referred to self more than mothers. However both parents referred to their girls more than their boys. Regarding event themes, parents discussed more social events with girls than with boys. Children themselves showed different gendered patterns; girls mentioned self and others, and relationships more than boys did, and children mentioned self and others more often when talking with fathers than with mothers. With respect to narratives about parents' childhood experiences, however, no gender differences were observed, save that parents referred to others more often in retrospective narratives told to girls than to boys. These findings suggest that gendered behaviours are best understood within the specific contexts and purposes of relational interactions.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Children's recollections of traumatic and nontraumatic events.

Whereas the social and emotional consequences of childhood trauma are well documented, less is known about how young children understand, represent, and remember traumatic experiences. A review of the literature indicates striking similarities in the development of young children's ability to recall traumatic and nontraumatic events. More specifically, events experienced before the age of about 18 months do not seem to be verbally accessible; events experienced between about 18 months and 2.5-3 years are reported in fragmentary fashion and seem to be prone to increasing error over time. From about age 3 years on, children can give reasonably coherent accounts of their past experiences and can retain these memories over long durations. The ways in which children are able to participate in conversations about events as they are occurring and in retrospect seems to play a critical role in their developing event memories. Implications of the empirical data for understanding trauma memory in childhood are discussed.

Child↗
PubMed1997

Developing narrative structure in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years.

This study is a longitudinal exploration of relations between parents' and children's provision of narrative structure in joint retellings of the past and children's developing personal narrative skills. Fifteen White, middle-class families participated when children were 40 and 70 months old. At both ages, mothers and fathers talked separately with children about shared past events and uniformed experimenters elicited children's personal narratives. Whereas mothers and fathers did not differ in how they structured past narratives, children narrated differently with fathers than with mothers. Further, even at 40 months, girls' narratives were more contexted and evaluative than boys, but parents' provision of narrative structure increased similarly with daughters and sons over time. Children's early abilities to provide evaluative narratives was a strong predictor of their later abilities to provide evaluative narratives; maternal emphasis on evaluations also predicted children's later narrative structure. Parental and child influences on personal narrative skill development are discussed.

Affect↗
PubMed1995

Say it once again: effects of repeated questions on children's event recall.

In this paper, we review research examining the influences of repeated questioning on children's event recall. Issues addressed include how children's free recall changes across multiple recounts of the same event, whether responding to specific questions about an event affects subsequent responses to those same questions, and whether there are developmental differences in how children respond to repeated questioning. Both naturalistic studies of conversational remembering and more controlled studies using standardized interviews are discussed. Effects of repeated questioning both within and across interviews are assessed. In integrating the research findings, we present a developmental framework for understanding the effects of repeated questioning that relies on children's developing memory and narrative skills as well as their social understanding of the recall context.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

Children's representation and recall of event alternatives.

In this study, we compared children's recall for alternative event components in both spontaneous and probed recall conditions. At four separate sessions, 4- and 7-year-old children repeatedly participated in the same two activities. Individual components of these activities varied across sessions, with alternatives introduced either (a) at every session or (b) at the third session only. At a fifth session, spontaneous event reports were elicited first, followed by probed recall for alternative event components. Not surprisingly, children in both age groups recalled more variable elements when probed than they did spontaneously. But probing facilitated older children's recall for alternatives to a greater extent than younger children's recall. Further, when directly probed, all children recalled components that always changed better than components that changed only once. These results provide additional evidence that the complexity of children's event representations increases with age, whereas the variable structure of recurring events may have similar effects across age.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1989

Time and again: effects of repetition and retention interval on 2 year olds' event recall.

How and what very young children remember is a central question for understanding the course of memory development. In this research, we examined the effects of two factors on 2-year-old children's ability to recall novel events: repetition of the experience and time since experience. Twenty 24-month-old and twenty 28-month-old children participated in unusual laboratory play events. Half of the children returned after a 2-week delay and again after a 3-month delay (repeated experience condition); the remaining children returned only after 3 months (single experience condition). Memory was assessed by asking children to reenact the events. Recall was generally accurate, and there were no significant effects of age. All children recalled more information about the activities associated with the event than about the objects. Surprisingly, children in the repeated experience condition recalled as much about the events at the 3-month retention interval as at the 2-week retention interval. Further, children in this condition recalled more information at the 3-month retention interval than children in the single experience condition, suggesting that reexperiencing an event may guard against long-term forgetting.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1985

Developmental changes in the understanding of temporal sequence.

In 3 experiments, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds' ability to sequence events was examined. We hypothesized that children initially construct temporal sequences by relying on the organization of their world knowledge instead of inferring logical relations among actions. In the first experiment, children generated picture sequences of familiar and unfamiliar events in forward and backward order without having seen the pictures in their correct sequence. In the second experiment, children reconstructed previously seen sequences, and in the third experiment, children were shown forward and backward sequences and reconstructed them in the opposite direction. Across experiments, the same pattern of performance was found; familiar events in forward order were the easiest to sequence, then unfamiliar events in forward order, familiar events in backward order, and finally unfamiliar events in backward order. These results are discussed along with other findings suggesting a similar pattern of performance across a wide developmental age span.

Child↗
PubMed1984

Learning about school: the development of kindergartners' school scripts.

This research examined the development of a general event representation and the relationship between general and specific event memories. Kindergarten children were interviewed about the school-day routine 4 times during the first 3 months of school. Even on the second day of school, children's reports were general and well organized, and the organization remained stable over time. With increasing experience, children reported more acts and more conditional statements, indicating that the representation became more elaborate and more temporally complex over time. Furthermore, children shared a remarkably common representation of the routine. All children tended to mention those acts that occupied a particular time and place in the classroom, and each of these acts seemed to encompass a list of possible activities in a hierarchic fashion. In contrast to the ease with which children reported the general routine, children had difficulty recalling specific episodes of the day before at all 4 interviews. These results indicate that children represent an event as a general spatial-temporal framework based on the first experience with a new routine; this framework becomes more elaborate and the temporal and the hierarchical organization of the representation becomes more complex with increasing experience with the event.

Child Development↗