Selecting retrieval cues for early-childhood amnesia: implications for the study of shrinking retrograde amnesia

A method for selecting semantic cues for early childhood memories is presented. The written records of episodes submitted by the subjects in the study of Crovitz and Harvey (1979) were coded into three-word strings of words in accordance with the gist of the memories. Nouns which described many retrievals (Set A) and nouns which had described few retrievals (Set B) were presented to an independent group of young adults as prompts for early childhood episodes. Prompting with semantic cues gave a fast rate of retrieval, with nouns in Set A cuing early childhood memories more successfully than nouns in Set B. The difference between words in Set A and Set B was found not to be a function of the frequency of usage of these words in the language. Implications for selecting cues to prompt retrieval of memories during the period of shrinking retrograde amnesia are discussed.