Magic Shrinking Machine Essay

Childhood Amnesia: The Magic Shrinking Machine Revisited

The magic shrinking machine experiment was conducted by Simcock and Hayne (2002) in which they showed that 3-year-olds were not able to use newly acquired words to describe the “magic” event 6 or 12 month later. There was no verbal prop during the test. Recently, the original designed was duplicated, a test on 33 and 39 month olds but with controlling for potential online reasoning, props were given at recall. The result showed that children were able to use newly acquired words to describe their preverbal memory. That is, the present study shows that previous non-verbal experiences can be verbalized if provide high level of contextual support, this finding is relevant to the offset of childhood amnesia.

Many developmental psychologists suggest that early life experiences have crucial impact on one’s life (Bowlby, 1951; Rutter, 2002). However, most adult can remember only few,

if any, of the memories from their lives before 3 years old. Freud (1905/1953) coined this paucity of memories in our autobiographic memory as childhood amnesia. Researchers who study childhood amnesia facing a paradox: why we as adult have difficulties recalling these early memories if they are crucial and affect our lives? (Rovee-Collier & Cuevas, 2009)
When older children and adults retrieve specific events or episodes, the report by default is presented verbally. However, these early experiences are stored and encoded when children’s language ability are under developed. In this paper, I will be discussing whether or not newly acquired knowledges can be used to describe these early events. First, let’s look at the reasoning that concerns young children’s ability to describe early experiences when their language ability was less mature.
Some lab-based studies have shown that memories encoded at the time when the children’s language skills were less mature have less evidence of verbal recall (e.g., Boyer, Barron, & Farrar, 1994). These studies share the same design character, that is, children were asked to recall the target event without any target props.
In another series of lab-based studies that were conducted by Bauer and her colleagues have shown that the presence of the target props at recall may help to improve children’s ability to talk about their previous experiences (e.g., Bauer, Kroupina, Schwade, Dropik, & Wewerka, 1998). It is also found that successful verbal retrieval base heavily on high degree of contextual props. Compare to naïve controls of equal age, children of 20 months succeed when providing contextual support, and they fail when there is no support or only presented with pictures (Bauer et al., 2004). This experiment supported the idea that memories encoded when language is less mature can made accessible later by proving high degree of contextual support.
The first study set out to find if children can use newly learned words to describe earlier memories was conducted by Simcock and Hayne (2002).

They taught 27-, 33- and 39-month-olds to operate a Magic Shrinking Machine, which could shrink normal size toy into smaller but identical looking replicas. Simcock and Hayne assessed the language ability of children at the time of encoding and the time testing. In addition to that, Simcock and Hayne (2002) also asked participants to fill out a list of words that are associated with the target event which allows them to evaluate whether children had acquired the necessary vocabulary to describe the event between two delays and to access if children use any new words to verbalize their memories. The follow up study was done 6 (or 12) months later, and not a single incident in which children use newly acquired words to describe the event. Thus, Simcock and Hayne (2002) concluded that children’s verbal report of the event were frozen in time, it reflect their verbal skill at the time of

encoding.
Bauer and colleagues obtained different result than Simcock and Hayne (2002). Although Bauer et al. did not access whether children use newly learned words to describe the previous experienced event, children in their study were able to verbalize the event more easily than children in Simcock and Hayne’s study. One of differences between these two experiences was the present and absent of the to-be-remembered props. Thus, Bauer el al. (2004) and Morris and Baker-Ward (2007) concluded that young child may need strong contextual props in order to report verbally when memories are encoded at a time with less developed language skills.