My research focuses on autobiographical memory—in practical terms, memory for the events of everyday life. Over the last several years, my students and I have investigated a series of questions: How malleable are autobiographical memories—how susceptible are they to distortion and change? To what extent does this sort of memory vary from person to person? Why do different people remember events in different ways? Why might some people have weaker memories than others? Can we reawaken memories that seem to have been lost?
Check out my Biography and CV page for a full list of publications. Here are some of my current projects:
Manipulating Early Memories
Take a moment to think back to the earliest event you can remember. How old were you at the time? If your answer falls somewhere around three and a half, you are in good company. Over the last 120 years, dozens of studies have posed this question, and the results have been remarkably consistent; on average, adults in Western cultures will say that they were somewhere between three and four years of age. Other studies, however, have shown that this estimate can be manipulated via social pressure or the presence of an authority figure. We wanted to see just how malleable these reports really were, so we ran two experiments that used anchoring paradigms to influence participants' estimates of their age during early autobiographical memories. (The anchoring effect occurs when people are asked to estimate a number about which they are uncertain, such as the length of the Mississippi River.) In both experiments, participants in the low-anchor condition gave earlier age estimates than those in the high-anchor condition. These findings show that reports of early autobiographical memories can be influenced by a relatively light touch--a change to a single digit in a single question.
Early Flashbulb Memories
Another project involves flashbulb memories, which are memories for shocking events such as the attacks of September 11th. Most of have vivid and detailed memories of the moment we heard about these events (hence the term "flashbulb"), and in fact these are some of the most powerful memories we have. The story is quite different for people in their mid- to late teens, however. Students entering the College in 2016-2017 were usually born in 1998, which means that their memory of 9/11 falls into the childhood amnesia period. Or does it? Are these memories so strong that they can breach the "wall" of childhood amnesia? If these students do remember 9/11, what are these memories like? Are they as vivid, as powerful, as detailed as the memories of adults? Do these students remember the same kinds of information, or are their memories affected by childhood?
Parent-Child Interactions
I've also begun working on some developmental memory research with Dr. Gabrielle Principe and two of our students. We're particularly interested in the ways in which parents affect the memories of their children. Past research shows that mothers discuss past events with their children in a variety of ways: some strongly encourage their children to remember on their own and come up with their own explanations for events; others take more of a "just-the-facts" approach. We're now exploring how these and other factors affect how children handle ambiguous situations.
Individual Differences in Autobiographical Memory
Another line of research examines the ways in which autobiographical memories differ from person to person. Decades of research have shown that some people can retrieve vivid and specific autobiographical memories, whereas others can only retrieve very general memories that do not refer to any event in particular. Previous research, including my own, has shown that several factors can influence the level of detail in autobiographical recall, including neurological conditions, depression, visual imagery ability, and old age. In one of my projects, I'm examining the effect of an understudied factor--namely, social support.
In particular, I'm interested in the ways in which social support interacts with age. For a variety of reasons, adults tend to lose their social networks as they age. This change could affect memory for several different reasons. First, social settings provide us with opportunities to talk about our memories, meaning that we engage in a sort of elaborate “rehearsal” that can help us remember later on. Second, social settings are themselves memorable—probably more memorable than an evening spent dozing in front of the television. We asked older adults to generate memories from three different periods of time: childhood, young adulthood, and the recent past. We also interviewed them about the amount of social support they were receiving, and distinguished between familial social support and the social support of friends. The results were straightforward: People with more familial social support had stronger memories from childhood, whereas the social support of friends did not seem to matter at all.