The Impact of Caregiving History on Later-Life Self-Perceptions of Aging.

Objectives: Theories suggest that self-perceptions of aging (SPA) reflect structural and cultural ageism together with an individual's personal life experiences. We examine the impact of an individual's history of informal caregiving on their SPA.

Methods: Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS, N = 8,372, age range 50-102 years), we investigated caregiving history as a determinant of later-life SPA.

Early-life Health as a Lifelong Precursor of Self-Related Views of Aging in Later Life.

Objectives: Age stereotypes and expectations about one's own aging commence in childhood but most research focuses on predictive associations with midlife health behaviors, later-life chronic conditions, biomarkers, and longevity. Surprisingly little is known about the role of poor childhood health in these associations. This study aims to fill this gap.

Long-term autobiographical memory across middle childhood: patterns, predictors, and implications for conceptualizations of childhood amnesia.

We examined recall of events by children 4-11 years to inform patterns of retention of autobiographical memories as well as factors that predict their survival. 101 children participated in a 4-year prospective study. At study inception, children were 4, 6, and 8 years.

Predictors of age-related and individual variability in autobiographical memory in childhood.

Development of autobiographical memory is as a gradual process beginning in early childhood and continuing through late adolescence. Substantial attention has been paid to early childhood when first personal memories are formed; less attention has been focused on the flourishing of memories from the late preschool years onward. We addressed this void with a three-year cohort-sequential study of age-related changes in the length, completeness, and coherence of autobiographical narratives by children 4-10 years.

Age Group Differences in Perceived Age Discrimination: Associations With Self-Perceptions of Aging.

Background And Objectives: From midlife onwards, age stereotypes increasingly underlie social judgments and contribute to age-based discrimination. Whereas many studies compare differences between young and older adults in reports of age discrimination or sensitivity to age stereotypes, few consider age group differences among adults over 50. We form subgroups corresponding to social age group membership (early midlife, late midlife, young old, oldest old) and examine differences in reported experiences of everyday age discrimination and associations with self-perceptions of aging.

Robust memory of where from way back when: evidence from behaviour and visual attention.

Retention of events typically exhibits a sharp initial decrease followed by levelling off of forgetting. In an apparent exception to this general rule, college students have robust memory for their own locations in obscured versions of photographs of their entering classes taken during orientation-related activities, whether tested 2 months or 42 months after the event. Experiment 1 of the present research was a test for conceptual replication of this finding in photographs depicting more than twice the number of students (and thus potential distracters).

Developmental changes in consistency of autobiographical memories: adolescents' and young adults' repeated recall of recent and distance events.

Autobiographical memories contribute continuity and stability to one's self yet they also are subject to change: they can be forgotten or be inconsistently remembered and reported. In the present research, we compared the consistency of two reports of recent and distant personal events in adolescents (12- to 14-year-olds) and young adults (18- to 23-year-olds). In line with expectations of greater mnemonic consistency among young adults relative to adolescents, adolescents reported the same events 80% of the time compared with 90% consistency among young adults; the significant difference disappeared after taking into consideration narrative characteristics of individual memories.

Realizing Relevance: The Influence of Domain-Specific Information on Generation of New Knowledge Through Integration in 4- to 8-Year-Old Children.

In accumulating knowledge, direct modes of learning are complemented by productive processes, including self-generation based on integration of separate episodes. Effects of the number of potentially relevant episodes on integration were examined in 4- to 8-year-olds (N = 121; racially/ethnically heterogeneous sample, English speakers, from large metropolitan area). Information was presented along with unrelated or related episodes; the latter challenged children to identify the relevant subset of episodes for integration.

The recollective qualities of adolescents' and adults' narratives about a long-ago tornado.

The recollective qualities of autobiographical memory are thought to develop over the course of the first two decades of life. We used a 9-year follow-up test of recall of a devastating tornado and of non-tornado-related events from before and after the storm, to compare the recollective qualities of adolescents' (n = 20, ages 11 years, 11 months to 20 years, 8 months) and adults' (n = 14) autobiographical memories. At the time of the tornado, half of the adolescents had been younger than age 6.

Predicting remembering and forgetting of autobiographical memories in children and adults: a 4-year prospective study.

Preservation and loss to forgetting of autobiographical memories is a focus in both the adult and developmental literatures. In both, there are comparative arguments regarding rates of forgetting. Children are assumed to forget autobiographical memories more rapidly than adults, and younger children are assumed to forget more rapidly than older children.

"Owning" the personal past: Adolescents' and adults' autobiographical narratives and ratings of memories of recent and distant events.

Adults and adolescents are characterised as having different perspectives on their personal or autobiographical memories. Adults are recognised as having vivid recollections of past events and as appreciating the meaning and significance of their autobiographical memories. In development, these qualities are noted as absent as late as adolescence.

Adults' reports of their earliest memories: consistency in events, ages, and narrative characteristics over time.

Earliest memories have been of interest since the late 1800s, when it was first noted that most adults do not have memories from the first years of life (so-called childhood amnesia). Several characteristics of adults' earliest memories have been investigated, including emotional content, the perspective from which they are recalled, and vividness. The focus of the present research was a feature of early memories heretofore relatively neglected in the literature, namely, their consistency.

The onset of childhood amnesia in childhood: a prospective investigation of the course and determinants of forgetting of early-life events.

The present research was an examination of the onset of childhood amnesia and how it relates to maternal narrative style, an important determinant of autobiographical memory development. Children and their mothers discussed unique events when the children were 3 years of age. Different subgroups of children were tested for recall of the events at ages 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 years.

Childhood amnesia in the making: different distributions of autobiographical memories in children and adults.

Within the memory literature, a robust finding is of childhood amnesia: a relative paucity among adults for autobiographical or personal memories from the first 3 to 4 years of life, and from the first 7 years, a smaller number of memories than would be expected based on normal forgetting. Childhood amnesia is observed in spite of strong evidence that during the period eventually obscured by the amnesia, children construct and preserve autobiographical memories. Why early memories seemingly are lost to recollection is an unanswered question.

Young Children's Memory for the Times of Personal Past Events.

Remembering the temporal information associated with personal past events is critical for autobiographical memory, yet we know relatively little about the development of this capacity. In the present research, we investigated temporal memory for naturally occurring personal events in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children. Parents recorded unique events in which their children participated during a 4-month period.

It's all about location, location, location: children's memory for the "where" of personally experienced events.

Episodic memory is defined as the ability to recall specific past events located in a particular time and place. Over the preschool and into the school years, there are clear developmental changes in memory for when events took place. In contrast, little is known about developmental changes in memory for where events were experienced.

Explaining variance in long-term recall in 3- and 4-year-old children: the importance of post-encoding processes.

Long-term recall is influenced by what originally was encoded as well as by the efficacy of retrieval processes. The possible explanatory role of post-encoding processes by which initially labile memory traces are stabilized and integrated into long-term memory (i.e.

characters and clues: factors affecting children's extension of knowledge through integration of separate episodes.

Children build up knowledge about the world and also remember individual episodes. How individual episodes during which children learn new things become integrated with one another to form general knowledge is only beginning to be explored. Integration between separate episodes is called on in educational contexts and in everyday life as a major means of extending knowledge and organizing information.

Declarative memory in abused and neglected infants.

To summarize, all children interacted with the experimenter and actively participated in the imitation task. There was evidence of improvement in performance from baseline to recall as would be expected with attention to, and memory for, the actions that were modeled by the experimenter. All participants evidenced a decrease in performance as the difficulty of the task increased, as would be expected.

The Role of Maternal Verbal, Affective, and Behavioral Support in Preschool Children's Independent and Collaborative Autobiographical Memory Reports.

The authors investigated the individual and relative contributions of different aspects of maternal support (i.e., verbal, affective, and behavioral) in relation to children's collaborative and independent reminiscing.

Maternal provision of structure in a deliberate memory task in relation to their preschool children's recall.

Strategic remembering emerges gradually during the preschool years. Socialization practices, specifically mother-child social interactions, might provide the foundation for the development of skills necessary for effective organization of information in memory. In the current study, 48 mothers and their 40-month-olds were engaged in the process of remembering (i.