E ÖTVÖS L ORÁND U NIVERSITY OF S CIENCE FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND PSYCHOLOGY

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Erna Halász

The pillars of the emergence of the autonoetic remembering: The examination of the perspective-taking and the narrative development

in early childhood

Doctoral (PhD) Thesis booklet

Supervisor: Ildikó Király, PhD, habil., associate prof.

May 2012

1. Introduction

The aim of our examinations is to reveal how young children recall real memories which are enriched with personal perspective, contextual and specific elements of the event.

These factors could help separate that event from the other ones. This developmental pathway support the children to break out of the neverending present to the evanescent future.

The young children’s early preverbal experiences are encoded as declarative memory performance with noetic consciousness without personal self perspective or experiential component. Thus these early memories are no more than skeletal event descriptions (Király, 2002, 2004; 2009b). When children talk about their day they recall routines or common and general characteristics an usual day. It means the autonoetic consciousness, which is one of the main characteristics of autobiographical memory (described with experiential and self consciousness) have not been there (Kónya, 2004).

According to Tulving’s term (1985b, 2002) the autonoetic consciousness (which extends to the person oneself) makes the recollection, therefore the mental time travel possible. We suppose that around 2 and 4 years of age, in the threshold of emergence of remembering, some abilities such as narrative development and the perspectrive-taking support the appearance of autonoetic consciousness. These scaffolding pillars might stand close and are interwoven but we wish to examine the two of them separately in young children.

2. The pillars of the emergence of the autonoetic remembering: the perspective-taking

We suggest the traditional developmental pathway of perspective-taking based on the breaking out of the egocentrism (Flavell, 1992, 2000) might need a thoughtful reconsideration. The results of recent research revealed that very young children (under 2 years of age) could handle others’ perspective which differs from their own (Onishi &

Baillargeon, 2005; Southgate et al, 2001, Surian et al, 2007, Kovacs et al, 2010). We highlight, however, concerning to the notion of perspective-taking in research there are quite confused and contradicted and varying in their methodology (e.g. Perner et al, 2003) so an integrated picture in this field is missing.

Study 1: The role of perspective-taking in two-three-year-old children. The visual and the conceptual perspective-taking: how could we separate them from each other?

In our studies, we try to examine the two facets of perspective taking, visual and conceptual perspective taking (the latter based on belief-induction) and disentangle the level of their connectedness regarding their development. Therefore the two types of perspective- taking were tested separately, using similar experimental setups (with elicited motoral answer) to reveal their developmental relationship around 3 years of age. Our results revealed that 73% of thirty 2-3 year-olds passed the conceptual perspective-taking task and 47% of them passed the visual perspective-taking task. These results support the assumption that children as young as 3 years of age are able to keep in mind others’ knowledge in order to solve a problem successfully, even before they could consider the relevance of the visual perspective of others. In order to exclude some other alternative explanation (e.g. the change of the constraints is quite hidden in the visual task) we need to create a control condition of the viusal perspective-taking task. The question remained, however, what exactly the characteristics are of this early competency: is this shared knowledge connected to a specific person? We revealed (in the control condition of the conceptual task) that our results could not be explained by early normativity hypotesis (Schmidt et al, 2011), the children consider the person’s specific knowledge and they did not extend it to an other (third) one.

Our results contradict the traditional developmental connectedness of that two facets of perspective taking (such as belief-induction is based on understanding the others’visual percepts, see e.g. Flavell et al, 1974). We suppose that 2-3-year olds are sensitive to gaps and overlaps between their own and another person’s knowledge (e.g. O’Neill, 1996) and they keep an ’experiential record’ (Perner & Roessler, 2010) for the other person, and use this record to predict actions. In other words it seems that our own perspective and the other’s perspective are not separeted from each other so sharply. The direct perspective is not encoded primerly and children seem to be very sensitive to the access of the other person’s konowledge or ignorance very early.

3. The pillars of the emergence of the autonoetic remembering: the narrative development

The narrative development during everyday conversations (parent-child reminiscing) is an important clue to a deeper understanding that our memories are representations of past events (representational theory of memory) and they could be evaluated from different

personal perspectives (Fivush, 2001). The narrative structures support the process and the specific unique memories of an event. The adult—child talks (mostly with parents) in early years use forms of narrative stuctures which makes the episodic (autonoetic) remembering possible (Fivush et al, 1996). Timing of adult—child talk (e.g. McGuigan & Salmon, 2004;

Haden et al, 2001) and its level of the elaborativeness (e.g. McGuigan Salmon, 2004;

Leichtman et al, 2000) effect later recall of the events. The question remains, however, in exactly what ways do the characteristics of accompanying narration that is more complex than linguistic labelling, influence the recall of events in young children who only begin to talk?

Study 2: The influence of linguistic setting on memory recall in two-three-year-old children

In our study we try to fill the gap which is found between the memory research about the effects of verbal ’labelling’ and reseach about narrative structures. There are many studies which apply imitation paradigm with preverbal children to reveal their memories (Herbert &

Hayne, 2000; Simcock & Hayne, 2002) but they operate only with labelling of presented actions or objects. Researchers of narrative development examine the children’s verbal recall without enacting the experienced event (Reese, Haden & Fivush, 1993; McGuigan & Salmon, 2004; Leichtman és mtsai, 2000). There are only few studies, however, that exploit infants’

nonverbal responses or imitation in order to explore how narrative linguistic setting influences event memory.

In line with the above, we also bring into the picture another, often neglected feature of narration, namely the relationship that exists between the child and the other participant. If we recall our former results about perspective-taking or for instance O’Neill’s (1996) classic study – in which two-year-olds showed more communicative behaviour in order to obtain a toy if the caregiver had not been present when the object was hidden, we can see that two- year-olds are sensitive to gaps and overlaps between their own and another person’s knowledge. This reasoning is supported by studies of word learning (Akhtar, Carpenter &

Tomasello, 1996; for a nonverbal variation: Tomasello & Haberl, 2003), showing that two- year-olds understand what (which object for instance) is a novelty from the adult’s point of view.

In our experiment, two –to three year-olds were tested in an elicited imitation paradigm.

The children received either narrative verbal information (n=21) or thematic, general verbal cues (n=21) during demonstration and they were tested after a week’s delay. We believe that a teaching-like, thematic linguistic setting follows the lines of everyday teaching dialogues,

and, as the model of Natural Pedagogy predicts (Csibra és Gergely, 2009), may facilitate the transfer of general knowledge. We supposed that, in contrast, a narrative linguistic setting will form a shared, common experience, facilitating the retention of specific, episodic features.

We wished to find out whether children differentiate between the people present during recall: is retrieval different in presence of the person with whom the child had shared the original experience as compared with retrieval in presence of a person who does not know about what happened? First, a baseline condition (n=15) served to assess the spontaneous performance of children on the new toys. On the base of the results of experimental groups we conclude that narrative linguistic setting can enhance memory retrieval by children who are not yet fluent speakers themselves. The children in the narrative group recalled more event steps a week later (figure 1).

Figure 1: Average number of recalled action elements across experimental groups

This advantage was shown in a more complete rendering of the script of the event and a deeper understanding of temporal-causal reasoning (Pillemer, Picariello & Pruett, 1994; Hoerl

& McCormack, 2005).

But a more complete recall of the event was not reflected in a tendency to recall a greater number of specific action elements (which did not fit into the event script). Moreover, the children did not stick to the original object from the experienced event. In reference to the other person who also takes part in the event gained an important role only in the older age group (after the median split: over 32 months). These children (over 32 months) recalled more event steps during the presence of the knowlegeable partner.

4. General discussion

In sum, about early memory development and the emergence of autonoetic remembering: recording an experience as personally experienced and the causal self- referential knowledge (Perner, 2000) is not accessible from the beginning, however, served by development. Therefore the 2-3 year-olds could encode other people’s knowledge considering objects or situations (which are different from their own), that perspective have not been the binding part of that information unit. However, there is a kind of shared perspective at a very early age, children could automatically read the others’ mind (see e.g. Kovacs et al, 2010) but without a long access to this perspective information. The appearance of that binding process (e.g. during joint reminiscing) makes possible that our memories are enriched with personal experience or point of view. In front of our laymen’s intuition, the personal point of view is a developmental step, not the starting point – both in everyday cognitive and the retrieval processes. Recording perspective(s) about some information is a developmental station which could significantly affect the development of some other cognitive abilities such as theory of mind or memory.

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