Course Textbook:
Goldstein, B. E. (2015). Cognitive psychology, connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th. ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Original Question:
What is the earliest event you can remember? How old were you at the time of the event? Describe the level of detail in the early memory and your certainty of the details compared to the same for an event that happened within the past 3 years. What would your course textbook say about likely causes for the differences?
Be sure to cite and reference all outside materials, including the text book. All posts should include at least one outside source. If you use the text book your citation should look like this (Goldstein, 2015) in the body of your post. If you are making a direct quote, you should also include the page number (Goldstein, 2015, p. 20). At the end of your post you should include the following Reference listing:
Goldstein, B. E. (2015). Cognitive psychology, connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th. ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Reply to the following response with 200 words minimum. (please make response as if having a conversation, respond directly to some of the statements in below post.)
In this week's readings, I found that memory over a life span can be simply described as: What determines which particular life events we will remember years later? Personal milestones such as graduating from college or receiving a marriage proposal stand out, as do highly emotional events such as surviving a car accident (Pillemer, 1998). "Events that become significant parts of a person's life tend to be remembered well."
I can remember at the age of 5 my father passed away. There are so many random memories that I have, and being that young people are always so surprised that I can remember the events of the day my mother received the call. I can remember the events at the time, we were in the kitchen preparing for dinner and when my mom received the call she screamed and dropped the phone What also made this memory stick with me, was my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister and she went into labor at the same hospital that we saw my father in for the last time.
I can so clearly remember the funeral and all of the details. Though I have memories of times we spent together, and certain things he did to make me laugh and even times when I got in trouble, the tragic situation seemed to be the one that I can remember the most,
Within the past three years, I had a similar situation happen to me. My boyfriend was killed in front of me, and when I found out that he passed away the same way my father had, those memories were triggered. The events surrounding his death were so similar; that the memory of my father's passing was so clear as if it happened in recent times. I found that certain things that really hold value in my life, I can remember with prevision, but for things such as what I ate on this same day last month, I would not be able to tell you that.
In the reading, I found that the cultural life script hypothesis would be the [phenomenon that resonates with my memories in this particular situation. Cultural life script hypothesis distinguishes between a person's life story, which is all of the events that have occurred in a person's life, and a cultural life script, which is the culturally expected events that occur at a particular time in the life span. (Goldstein, 2015, p. 210)
. "For example, when Dorthe Berntsen and David Rubin (2004) asked people to list when important events in a typical person's life usually occur, some of the more common responses were falling in love (16 years), college (22 years), marriage (27 years), and having children (28 years).
Interestingly, a large number of the most commonly mentioned events occur during the period associated with the reminiscence bump. This doesn't mean that events in a specific person's life always occur at those times, but according to the cultural life script hypothesis, events in a person's life story become easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script for that person's culture."
References:
Goldstein, B. E. (2015). Cognitive psychology, connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th. ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.