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Does priming lead to earlier memories, or just earlier dating of memories?
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DOI：10.1080/09658211.2026.2633432.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Several studies have reported that it is relatively easy to manipulate the age of people's earliest memory through providing priming information or warm-up questions prior to recall. When given primes that differ (e.g. ages 2/3 versus 6), the memories participants retrieved were dated earlier when given early primes and later when given late primes. One proposed explanation is that differential primes foster memory retrieval from different ages. Here we explored whether the memories themselves were from earlier versus later in a person's life chronology, or whether all that was manipulated is the dating information attached to those memories. To do this, 200 young adults were informed that earliest memories typically date from either age 2 or 4, and given example vignettes. Participants then recalled and dated their earliest memory. Independent verification and dating was provided by 117 parents and data for the remaining 83 were imputed. Results showed that participants given earlier primes dated their first memory to younger ages than did participants given later primes, consistent with prior research. However, the ages of the memories did not differ between groups according to parental information. Thus, what is manipulated may only be the attached time-tags for the memories.
Keywords:
Earliest memories
childhood amnesia
event memories
age estimates
dating memories
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