A Dynamic Approach to the Co-Construction of Autobiographical Memory: Insights from Dyadic Conversations about the Past - eScholarship

A Dynamic Approach to the Co—construction of Autobiographical Memory: Insights From Dyadic Conversations About the Past Laura Petra (laurapetra@psychology.ro) Department of Psychology, Babes-Bolyai University Republicii Str.37, Cluj—Napoca, 400015, ROMANIA Oana Benga (oanabenga@psychology.ro) Department of Psychology, Babes-Bolyai University Republicii Str.37, Cluj—Napoca, 400015, ROMANIA Ioana Tincas (ioana.tincas@gmail.com) Department of Psychology, Babes-Bolyai University Republicii Str.37, Cluj—Napoca, 400015, ROMANIA Abstract Autobiographical memory can be conceived of as the personalized verbal narrative and imagistic structure that conveys a coherent personal history and contributes to the deﬁnition of the self. The purpose of the study is to apply a novel approach — inspired from the dynamic systems methodology — to the investigation of early autobiographical memory development. Ten mother-child dyads’ conversations about unique past events were recorded longitudinally at three successive time points; the children’s mean age was 35, 41 and 47 months, respectively. The conversational style of the dyad was explored using state space grids (Lewis, Lainey, and Douglas, 1999), a dynamic systems method which allows the plotting of the dyadic interaction as it proceeds in real time. Results are discussed in a framework that emphasizes the dynamic, co- and re-constructive nature of the autobiographical discourse and its role in the shaping of future autobiographical memory skills. Keywords: Autobiographical memory; dynamic systems; state space grids; mother-child conversation; development. Introduction Autobiographical memory represents the personalized verbal narrative and imagistic structure that conveys a coherent personal history and contributes to the deﬁnition of self. As Neisser (2004) points out, research regarding the emergence of autobiographical memory was triggered by its relationship to the puzzling phenomenon of infantile amnesia, a number of theories being proposed to explain this phenomenon (see Nelson, 1993; Pillemer & White, 1989, for reviews). Since then, a consistent body of research has been devoted to potential factors involved in the early beginnings of autobiographical memory, one of the most critical being the social construction of personal narratives during parent-child conversations. The social dimension of narrative discourse about the past has been extensively studied (see Nelson & Fivush, 2004; Reese, 2002, for recent reviews) and acknowledged as a territory at the interplay of multiple social, cognitive and neural dimensions (Benga & Petra, 2002). 1732 Traditional methods of measuring change The emergence and early development of autobiographical memory has previously been approached by several longitudinal studies, focused on changes in the format and content of adult-child conversations (e.g, Fivush, Haden & Reese, 1996; Fivush & Hamond, 1990; Hudson, 1990; Reese, Haden & Fivush, 1993). Various developmental perspectives can be circumscribed either by a scaﬂolding model, considering that the parent is initially providing all the conversational support and retiring it in time when it is not needed anymore; or by a spiral model, emphasizing the role of the joint reminiscing, both dialogue participants reciprocally enriching and embellishing their conversational style in time. Although based on a social constructivist framework and focusing on parent-child / adult-child joint reminiscing, these studies are constrained — by the very analytical tools they use — to quantify punctual performance in each partner of the dyad, and to connect time-points in correlational models. Such approaches are limited in their power to adequately capture even individual change, not to mention dyadic changes via verbal interactions. The dynamic approach Reese (2002) claimed that recent theories of autobiographical memory required something that “has much in common with a dynamic systems approach to development [. ] in order to discover how change in the system as a whole is taking place as a result of at times minute changes at a particular age or level” (p. 137). Our paper aims to provide such a dynamic perspective that can be characterized by some particular elements: ﬁrst of all, the classical analysis that correlates global features of the maternal discourse with the child’s narrative skills (analyzed separately) is replaced by a dyadic analysis. Each unit of analysis from the state space (behavioral repertoire) represents a two—event sequence, or a simultaneously coded parent-child event (i.e., a dyadic state). This leads us to the second aspect of the approach we are proposing, namely the re-construction of the discourse as a trajectory in time. Each individual trajectory consists of