28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

conceptions of gender-appropriate activity is socialized in early Euro-American parent-child
reminiscing and internalized by middle childhood in the ways in which boys and girls narrate their
past. I focus specifically on the roles of emotion and interpersonal relations in the construction of
a gendered autobiographical self.
1012.3 Childhood recollection in U.S., British, and Chinese young adults, Q. Wang 1 , M.A.
Conway 2 , Y.B. Hou 3 , 1 Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA; 2 University of Durham, UK; 3 Peking
University, Beijing, China
Chinese, British, and Caucasian American participants were asked to recall as many childhood
memories (of events occurring before age 5), including their earliest memory, as they could in a
five-minute period. Chinese participants recalled fewer memories and had earliest memory 6
months later than either of the Western groups. The cultural differences in the period of childhood
amnesia are explained in terms of cultural self-construals and related cultural narrative practices. It
is proposed that cultures with an autonomous self-construal which prioritizes elaborative memory
talk have earlier childhood memories and shorter periods of infantile amnesia than cultures with a
relational self-construal.
1012.4 Autobiographical memory and children’s testimony: A cross-cultural perspective, M.E.
Pipe, Y. Orbach, M. Lamb, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development,
Bethesda, MD, USA
The ability of young children to provide testimony depends in a large part on a combination of
their narrative skills and their memories of the events in question. To the extent that cultural
differences in socialization and narrative practices influence the emergence of autobiographical
memory and the way in which children narrate and remember their personal experiences, these
differences will be reflected in young children’s emerging testimonial competence. We examine
the evidence for cultural differences in children’s accounts when they are interviewed in forensic
contexts and explore the implications of socio-cultural theory within the legal sphere.
1013 INVITED SYMPOSIUM
Development and learning: New frontiers
Convener and Chair: R. Gelman, USA
1013.1 Participation in practice, domain-specific constraints and domain-general mechanisms
for conceptual categorization and induction, G. Hatano, University of the Air, Wakaba, Japan
Even young children acquire, through repeated participation in culturally organized practices,
skills to perform competently in those practices. In several selected domains they also acquire a
coherent and principled body of knowledge. The acquisition of this body of knowledge cannot
readily be explained by connectionist or other quasi-empiricist models. However, it can plausibly
be explained without relying on radical natives assuming innate abstract knowledge, by combining
weak domain-specific constraints as biases and preferences and domain-general mechanisms for
categorization of induction that seek conceptual or higher-order coherence.
1013.2 Understanding failure by modeling success: Child’s ‘theory of mind’, A. Leslie, Rutgers
University, Piscataway, NJ, USA
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