Cognitive conceptions of language and the development of autobiographical memory.
John Sutton
Page 4
Source: http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/CognitiveConceptionsofLanguage.htm
5. The supra-communicative view
Motor development relies on adult help offered at particular moments, so that skills such as walking and swimming can later be performed independently. Similarly, certain forms of cognitive development require external aid – from the human and the natural environment – in the course of learning how to think, remember, or solve problems independently. Most children learn similar motor skills, when characterized broadly, but the idiosyncrasies of their particular developmental trajectory leave traces on their habits, expertise, and patterns of action. Likewise, different developmental paths result in similar mature cognitive capacities, but the peculiar form of the interpersonal scaffolding which has been gradually internalized may leave traces in the idiosyncrasies of their subsequent cognitive performance (Thelen and Smith, 1994; Clark 1997, chapter 2; Griffiths and Stotz, 2000). This is an enabling cultural sculpting of the child’s mind, which runs alongside (and is intimately tangled with) the productive cultural shaping of their body, skills, and behaviour.
Andy Clark’s use of these Vygotskian themes is, as Carruthers notes, "a sort of intermediate-strength version" (2001, section 2.3), neither so mild as to slip back into expressivism, nor so strong as to make language actually restructure the mind. The idea is significantly weaker than Carruthers’, because it deals only with the influence of language on diachronically extended processes of thinking (or remembering) over time: individual tokenings of mental representations still have their contents entirely independent of any linguistic representation (Carruthers 2001, section 2.3). In other words, there is a clear distinction between Clark’s connectionist-inspired anti-expressivism and the lingualist anti-expressivism of either Carruthers or extreme Whorfians.
Words, for Clark, act as filters, labels, and other tools for thinking. Language is a key cognitive technology, which transforms and reshapes computations. In particular, the rendering of a thought in linguistic form helps to turn the thought into an object, making it more stable, to be considered, reconsidered, and utilized on future occasions (Clark 1996; 2001a, pp.143-7). This isn’t simply a matter of augmenting memory with external symbol systems; in addition, it allows for self-criticism, and for using thoughts about thought to help us then structure the (physical and social) world in ways which further aid our cognitive processes. As Clark puts it, in making "designer environments", we are (individually and collectively) able to "make the world smart so that we can be dumb in peace" (1997, p.180; 2001b).
The supra-communicative view of language, then, is part of a more general vision of the ‘extended mind’: the vehicles of mental representation spread beyond the brain and body into cognitive instruments and symbol systems, and perhaps other people’s minds (Clark and Chalmers 1998). The point is not that symbol systems outside the mind are like our inner capacities, but that quite disparate inner and outer elements can be coopted simultaneously into integrated larger cognitive systems for particular purposes (1997, p.220; 2001b). Internal engrams link up in extended networks with what Merlin Donald calls ‘exograms’ which have quite different properties (1991, 308-319; compare Rowlands 1999, chapter 6), so that these temporary extended systems must be studied by diverse sciences of the interface which deal with cognition and media at once.
Again, my aim here is not to defend this perspective against objections, but rather to point out that it is a genuine alternative to both expressivism and lingualism. This is why it is an attractive package for thinking about the developmental psychology of autobiographical memory.
6. Social interactionism and autobiographical memory development
The relative roles of language and culture, temporal representation, theory of mind and metarepresentational capacities, and self-schemata in the development of autobiographical memory are not at all clear. On the ‘social-interactionist’ view, parental and cultural models or strategies for the recounting of past events act as initial scaffolding on which children start to hang their own memories. They then internalize the forms and narrative conventions appropriate to their context (Nelson 1993; Fivush 1991; Nelson and Fivush 2000).
The point here is not that children cannot remember in solitude; nor that they remember only what they talk about; nor that all their personal memories must take some narrative form (rather than, for instance, being isolated sensory memories). Rather, the point is that both shared and inner reminiscing alters the form and the content of subsequent AMs. Through shared talk about the past, children learn both the appropriate forms for recollective reports, and the social functions of such talk. Variations in narrative practices may then reappear in the subjective idiosyncrasies of early remembering as children begin both to develop a life history and to be able to tell others what they are like.
Cultural variations in the nature and contexts of talk about the past, and intracultural variation in the motivations for and the richness of specific kinds of remembered narratives, have been investigated in some detail within this tradition. In general, the children of parents who engage in more ‘elaborative’ and less repetitive or pragmatic conversation about the past will themselves spontaneously produce richer narratives. In America at least, mothers and fathers on average talk more elaboratively about the past, and with more emotional content, with girls than with boys (Reese, Haden, and Fivush, 1993; Fivush 1994). This may be related to the fact that, on average, women across cultures report earlier and richer memories from childhood than do men (MacDonald, Uesiliana, and Hayne 2000). Cultural style too affects memory over time too. Caucasian American mothers and children talk more about the role of the self in past episodes than do Korean dyads, and the Americans also include a higher proportion of references to their own and others’ emotional states in narrating the past (Mullen and Yi 1995).
Many intricate issues arise in interpreting this flourishing social-interactionist research tradition . In particular, the extent to which these individual and cultural variations have any longer-term influences on later AM is not clear. I will raise my simpler concern after briefly mentioning some alternative perspectives. Some who offer rich definitions of genuine AM argue that the full-blown capacity does not emerge until around the age of 4: this is when the child’s theory of mind develops sufficient sophistication to understand that some forms of knowledge derive causally from specific past episodes which have been personally experienced (Perner and Ruffman 1995, Perner 2000). This account may yet be compatible with a social-interactionist picture of the earlier, component stages of AM development.
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