Boundaries Of Childhood Amnesia Research

Peterson et al.’s (2010) research argued that methodology in measuring different genders can influence the amount of information participants are recalling from their earlier childhood memories. Peterson et al. (2010) argued that many of the differences that researchers observe in studies are from how females and males recall their early childhood memories, which is by the administration of a written questionnaires. Furthermore, Peterson et al. (2010 administered oral individual interviews to half of the participants in their study and administered the other half of the participants written group tests. Each of the group contained an equal amount of females and males. The results concluded that when participants were given an individual oral …show more content…
However, Wang and Peterson (2014) argue that throughout the research there were two very distinct assumptions made that prevented clarification on the boundaries of childhood amnesia. First, Wang and Peterson (2014) argue that individuals typically postdate life events, which can greatly influence the boundaries of childhood amnesia. Second, Wang and Peterson (2014) argue that assuming memories become more unreachable as individual age is argumentative. Thus, to prove their theory, Wang and Peterson (2014) conduct two studies. These studies involved interviewing children in their home on events that occurs in their early childhood ages (Wang and Peterson, 2014). Within the first study, the child would be interviewed once and asked to call their earliest memory, which may be prompted by the interviewer (Wang and Peterson, 2014). Wang and Peterson (2014) would then interview the children a year later; however, this time, the events that were recalled from the first interviewed would not be prompted and instead was expected to be an impulsive recall from the child. In the second study, children were interviewed similarly like the first interview from the first study; however, the children were interviewed again two years later and if the child did not spontaneous recall the events that they recalled in the first interview, …show more content…
They critiqued their study and concluded that the results were inconclusive since it did not provide enough data from across multiple years (Wang & Peterson, 2016). Furthermore, they proceeded by conducting the same research study from 2014. They gathered a majority of the children that participated in their study back in 2014 and had a follow up after two years and another follow up after 8 years (Wang & Peterson, 2014). Just like the study from 2014, the current study concluded that as the participants aged, they were more likely to postdate the life events(Wang & Peterson, 2016). Furthermore, Wang and Peterson (2016) argue that the boundary is mostly likely a lot younger than researchers currently