Cognitive conceptions of language and the development of autobiographical memory.
John Sutton
Page 5
Source: http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/CognitiveConceptionsofLanguage.htm
A more direct competitor to social-interactionism is the ‘self-recognition’ approach (Howe and Courage 1997). On this view, the personalization of event memory requires the emergence of the ‘cognitive self’ usually late in the 2nd year. The emergence of AM is "controlled by the discovery of the cognitive self", which can then organize information by reference to goals; and the development of AM is then controlled by "increases in the ability to maintain information in memory storage". Infantile amnesia is due not to any memory deficit but to the lack of a personal frame of reference. For Howe and Courage, language thus plays only an ancillary, expressive role in communicating memories. The individual differences in early AM which the social-interactionists study are likely, they argue, to be "related to maturational, not social or experiential, factors" (1997, p.515). Ignoring direct challenges to the self-recognition approach . Although Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000, p.279) suggest that their related model, which relies on the development of a ‘self-memory system’ to drive early AM, is not incompatible with moderate versions of social-interactionism, there is at least one particular point of tension between the traditions.
There may be a variety of strong interactions between individual and shared reminiscence, as the social-interactionists argue. But this does not mean that the child’s developing internal representations are a straightforward projection or internalization of the shared narratives. Fivush and her colleagues occasionally write as if the format of autobiographical memory is itself linguistic or language-like, as if children simply incorporate the forms and contents of local external narratives. Following Vygotsky, Fivush argues that "the narrative forms that children are learning to organize their recounting of past experiences are also used for organizing their internal representations of past experiences" (1994:138). This is possible, but the argument slides too quickly towards a lingualist conception of mental representation. One might compare the way in which the sociologist of collective memory Maurice Halbwachs slips from the claim that memories are not preserved "in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access, for they are recalled to me externally" to the different, more lingualist claim that "one cannot think about the events of one’s past without discoursing about them" (1925/1992, p.38, p.53; Sutton 2002, section 4). There are legitimate intermediate positions. We can accept that what Peggy Miller calls the "distribution of storytelling rights" in a culture or in a family may strongly influence the uses and the contents of individual memories (Miller et al 1990), without having to assume that either the format or the organization of those individual memories is literally linguistic or narrative.
The problem here is partly methodological, in that there are no clear nonverbal measures of AM. It is in general very hard to find non-linguistic ways of thinking about personal narratives. Thus there is always a danger, in the social-interactionist tradition, of mistaking what are primarily early linguistic proficiency or narrative skills for more specific mnemonic abilities. As Howe and Courage complain, "the expression need not be isomorphic with the memory representation" (1997, p.505). The social interactionists address the problem by seeking to correct for the total amount of talk, so that a case can be made that memory is independent of linguistic skill. Harley and Reese (1999) also suggest that event sequencing tasks (action sequences, such as those involved in acting out a picnic or a train ride) are a nonverbal analogue of narrative structure in AM.
But there is also a richer, more theoretically-grounded, way of averting such criticism. This would require an explicit commitment to some anti-lingualist vision of mental representation, such as that offered by Clark. To the extent that the social interactionists have been aware of anti-lingualist options (such as connectionist accounts of mental representation), they have perhaps seen them as too expressivist, and as requiring an individualist vision of the vehicles of representation as solely in the head. The supra-communicative view, though, demonstrates that anti-lingualists can also be anti-expressivists. It remains, then, to suggest just how this combination of views might be fruitful in understanding the development of AM.
7. Towards a developmental systems view: internalization and self-regulation
Harley and Reese (1999) make the further claim that their evidence shows the existence of different pathways to early AM. Children who are early self-recognizers (according to the self-recognition tests described by Howe and Courage 1997) may find their way to AM in a fashion that is rather more independent of the linguistic environment. Late self-recognizers, in contrast, may need to use linguistic and narrative scaffolding to achieve similar outcomes in the AM system. Parental reminiscence style and self-recognition, then, may predict different aspects of talk about the past (1999, p.1345).
The primary theoretical task for the social interactionists, then, in addition to pursuing integrated pluralist models of the development of AM (compare Welch-Ross, 1995), is in trying to clarify just what AM is. What could it mean to say that AM is in some sense influenced or even structured by the local narrative environment, if this is not to mean that representation in AM is itself linguistic in form? How exactly do particular genre-related cultural norms and narratives sculpt AM, if those norms and narratives are not simply downloaded into the mind? What kind of constrained free play, or regulated improvisation, is there in the relation between narrative tradition and the process of learning to remember?
In a line of thought entirely compatible with Clark’s supra-communicative view, Ruth Millikan sees "the stabilizing hand of language" as its key cognitive role, enabling us both to learn complex concepts, and to reidentify the objects of those concepts "in the flesh" (2001, pp.164-5). Talk about the past, in particular, whether interpersonal or in the form of private inner speech, is one example of this process as turned inwards. The repeated recovery of episodes of the personal past in certain kinds of intentional retrieval, for example, may turn out to depend strongly on the role of language in AM. For Clark, by using words to think with, we artificially create an approximation of stable, context-independent, abstract representations for later inspection, manipulation, and shared attention. Here the mental item which is stabilized is a perspective on the personal past. It may be by utilizing local narrative resources to "freeze" thoughts about the past in this way (compare Clark, 1997, p.210) that children develop the perspective-switching abilities which allow them to understand that others have different perspectives on the same once-occupied time.
The verbalizing of thoughts about the past may change their content : and the particular ways in which this occurs in childhood involve the internalization of locally-available cognitive props or pivots with which we slowly master and civilize our own brains (compare Dennett 2000). We simply don’t yet know enough about the developmental and personality psychology of memory to have any clear idea of the long-term effects on AM of individual cognitive trajectories in development. The particular cultural, parental, and institutional learning aids which scaffold the development of AM are, in a way, deeply contingent. Self-regulation within a culture involves the active construction of personal life stories in processes which combine reproduction and tradition with variation and inconsistency (compare Strauss and Quinn 1997, chapter 3).
There are a number of integrative options for taking these interdisciplinary speculations further. Recent neuroimaging studies of episodic memory might offer one way of testing specific developmental hypotheses about the causal paths of AM acquisition. Cognitive ethological studies of temporal representation in creatures without self-schemata can investigate what memory systems might nonetheless be in common. Cognitive neuropsychological and neuropsychiatric case studies might reveal some patterns of breakdown in the relation between individual brains and the narrative environment. Even if neurobiologists and narrative theorists are not studying the same phenomena, the idea of constructing a positive framework in which their different investigations into memory might be located may one day look a little less hopeless.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Maria Trochatos for research assistance on this project. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in Melbourne and Sydney: my thanks for helpful questions and criticisms to Sally Andrews, William Armour, Samir Chopra, Jim Franklin, Jeannette Kennett, Sandra Lynch, Steve Matthews, Doris McIlwain, and Fred Westbrook.
We Make it Easy to Succeed
Successwaves, Intl.
Brain Based Accelerated Success Audios
 |