Psychological Review Copyright 1997 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

1997, Vol. 104, No. 3, 499-523 0033-295X/97/$3.00

The Emergence and Early Development of Autobiographical Memory

Mark L. Howe and Mary L. Courage

Memorial University of Newfoundland

The authors provide a new framework that integrates autobiographical memory with other early
achievements (e.g., gesturing, language, concept formation). In this theory, the emergence and early
development of autobiographical memory does not require the invocation of specialized neurological
or multiple memory mechanisms but rather arises as a natural consequence of developments in
related domains including in the "software" that drives general memory functioning. In particular,
autobiographical memory emerges contemporaneously with the cognitive self, a knowledge structure
whose features serve to organize memories of experiences that happened to "me." Because this
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cognitive self emerges in the 2nd year of life, the lower limit for early autobiographical memories
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is set at about 2 years, with subsequent accumulation of memories linked to improvements in

children's ability to maintain information in storage.

One problem that has challenged scientists for more than a
century is the phenomenon of infantile amnesia. Specifically,
why is it that adults are unable to recall childhood events that
occurred before the age of 2-3 years, yet are able to recall
events that occurred after this age? This question is even more
perplexing in the light of ample evidence that infants and tod-
dlers are able to encode event information and to store it for
considerable periods of time (for reviews, see Howe & Courage,
1993; Rovee-Collier & Bhatt, 1993). This apparent discontinu-
ity is at the heart of the enigma of infantile or childhood amnesia.
Historically, most explanations have invoked either retrieval fail-
ure (e.g., repression, mismatches between initial encoding and
later retrieval contexts) or storage failure (e.g., perceptual or
neurological immaturity, inadequate encoding) to explain this
discontinuity in the accessibility (or availability) of early auto-
biographical memories. Invariably, these have failed to meet the
rigors of empirical scrutiny and have been rejected, leaving
the enigma unresolved (see Howe & Courage, 1993, for a
discussion).
Recently, we (Howe & Courage, 1993) have adopted a new
approach to this recalcitrant problem. In a review of the litera-
ture in this area, we argued that there was no evidence for
discontinuity in memory, that the fundamental components of
the information processing system are present and functioning
in the human neonate, and that the seeming discontinuity in the
recall of personally experienced events originates not in the
memory ' 'hardware'' per se, but in other areas of memory "soft-
Mark L. Howe and Mary L. Courage, Department of Psychology,
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland,
Canada.
Preparation of this article was supported by Natural Science and
Engineering Research Council of Canada Grants OGP0003334 and
OGP0093057.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mark
L. Howe, Department of Psychology, Memorial University of Newfound-
land, St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada A1B 3X9. Electronic mail may
be sent via Internet to mhowe@morgan.ucs.mun.ca.
ware,'' namely, the emergence of the cognitive self. In effect, our
review provided the kernel for the claim that the development of
the cognitive self late in the 2nd year of life (as indexed by
visual self-recognition) provides a new framework around
which memories can be organized. With this cognitive advance
in the development of the self, we witness the emergence of
autobiographical memory and the end of infantile amnesia.
In the present article, we develop a more formal theory of
the emergence and early development of autobiographical mem-
ory, one that links changes in a number of areas of cognitive,
linguistic, and socioemotional functioning, to the personaliza-
tion of event memory. Although we recognize that these develop-
mental shifts do not occur independently, we regard the matura-
tion of the cognitive self as a cornerstone in the emergence of
autobiographical memory. In giving this preeminence to the
cognitive self, our theory stands in marked contrast to a number
of other contemporary views that give primacy to sociolinguistic
factors in the emergence of autobiographical memory and shift
its onset (and the corresponding offset of infantile amnesia)
late into the preschool years (Fivush & Hamond, 1990; K. Nel-
son, 1993; Pillemer & White, 1989; Snow, 1990; Tessler &
Nelson, 1994). Because we have addressed the fundamental
differences between these approaches to this problem before
(e.g., see Howe & Courage, 1993), we will not reiterate the
issues again here. Instead, the primary purpose of this article is
to develop the core of our approach into a more comprehensive
theory of the emergence and early development of autobiograph-
ical memory.
To do this, we confront three fundamental issues. First, we
revisit the popular proposition that there exists a basic disconti-
nuity in memory during the first 2 years of life and memory
after the first 2 years of life. Reviewing recent advances in the
infant memory literature, we show how the same variables that
affect memory in childhood and adulthood also affect memory
(in the same way) during the first 2 postnatal years. With this
evidence in hand, and with the evidence presented here as well
as earlier (e.g., Howe & Courage, 1993) that neurological and
perceptual changes during this time frame do not uniquely im-

499
 500 HOWE AND COURAGE
pact the onset of autobiographical memory, we can safely and
finally rule out the proposition that infantile amnesia is due
to some qualitative shift in neural hardware during memory
development.
Second, we link our theoretical framework with the literature
on other significant changes that occur during the 18-24-month
age range, including how our theory squares with the literature
on language development. Specifically, we argue that (a) mem-
ory is fundamentally amodal even in the earliest months of life;
(b) language plays an ancillary, not deterministic, role in the
expression of those memories; (c) the onset of the cognitive
self is no different from the onset of other cognitive categories
or knowledge structures that serve to organize memories early
in life and, that like these other concepts, derive from nonverbal
representations and experience that become verbalizable only
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after they are fully functioning cognitive entities; and (d) recent
evidence from the study of receptive language, gesturing, and
gesture-language transitions confirm the primacy of the devel-
opment of the self in the acquisition of autobiographical
memory.
Third, in addition to accounting for how the onset of autobio-
graphical memory is continuous with early (event) memory,
our theory also provides an explanation for the often observed
increase in the number of memories adults are able to recall
from their childhoods as a function of age in childhood. That
is, why should a 20-year-old's memories of early life be more
numerous from when they were 7 years old than when they were
5 years old than when they were 3 years old? Although the onset
of the cognitive self sets a lower limit for early autobiographical
memories at around 2 years, one that is consistent with the data
(e.g., Usher & Neisser, 1993), we have yet to explain these
subsequent increases in childhood memories that occur follow-
ing the onset of the cognitive self. This growth in childhood
memories has been known for some time (e.g., Waldvogel,
1948) but has rarely been accounted for in theories of infantile
amnesia. Our answer to this part of the puzzle is that as children
get older, the ability to maintain information in storage increases.
This increase in storage maintenance is not confined to autobio-
graphical memory but typifies all of memory functioning (for
a review, see Howe & O'Sullivan, in press).
Finally, we conclude by pointing out some of the predictions
that fall out of our theory as well as some of the methodological
limitations inherent in studying very early memory development.
In particular, we consider between- and within-individual differ-
ences in the onset and growth of autobiographical memory as
well as problems concerning the definition of autobiographical
memory, distinguishing autobiographical memory from other
episodic or event-like memories, and questions concerning the
use of nonverbal as well as verbal indices of memory. As it
turns out, just because a report is verbal in its expression does
not mean it is accurate. Thus, verbal measures may provide
no more faithful a window on autobiographical memories than
nonverbal measures. All of these issues provide fodder for future
research.
In what follows, we discuss each of these points in turn.
Before doing this, however, we need to clarify our use of certain
terms. Because our model of memory and development is funda-
mentally dynamic, many of the traditional dichotomies (e.g.,
continuity-discontinuity, unitary-multiple memory systems,
structure-process) are unsuitable. Therefore, in order to be
clear and to make contact with more traditional usage, we spec-
ify what we mean in our use of these terms.
Consider first the terms continuity-discontinuity and the issue
of unitary versus multiple memory systems. Although there is
no consensus concerning whether memory development consists
of a unitary or multiple memory system (or systems) that
changes in a continuous or discontinuous fashion, our analysis
more closely resembles that found in recent dynamic modeling
efforts (e.g., see Howe, 1994; Howe, Rabinowitz, & Grant,
1993; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Thelen & Smith, 1994). Consis-
tent with the idea in dynamic models that growth involves both
continuities and discontinuities, our claim is that in some cir-
cumstances, performance aspects of memory development may
appear discontinuous when in fact they are being driven by
underlying processes that are continuous. For example, memory
development in the age ranges we are discussing is continuous
in the sense that the hardware structures (e.g., the underlying
neurological, sensory, and attentional mechanisms; see the sec-
tion Neuroscience and Memory Continuity) and software pro-
cesses (e.g., strategy use, metamemory, acquired knowledge,
language) that are necessary for the formation of (encoding),
maintenance in (storage), manipulation of (e.g., receding), and
subsequent access to (retrieval) information in long-term mem-
ory (see the section Integrating the Self Into Models of Memory:
A Dynamic View of Memory and Retention) are functional very
early in life and can be used in the establishment of all memo-
ries, autobiographical and otherwise. Memory development ap-
pears discontinuous in the sense that autobiographical memory
requires the establishment of a functional cognitive structure
pertaining to the self, that is, one that can mediate memories of
events that happened to a ' 'me.'' As this cognitive or knowledge
structure does not come "on-line" until 18-24 months of age,
autobiographical memory appears to be discontinuous at the
level of memory performance, that is, the establishment of the
cognitive self at this age is a necessary precondition for the
formation and subsequent articulation of autobiographical mem-
ories. However, the establishment of this cognitive sense of self
is probably continuous. As we argue later in this article, the self
does not suddenly appear at 18-24 months. Rather, the self,
like other knowledge structures, begins organizing from birth
but does not become functional (i.e., affect memory behavior,
in this case) until it reaches a certain viability. Thus, at the level
of memory performance, the emergence of autobiographical
memory appears to be discontinuous. However, in terms of basic
cognitive processes, the growth of the self per se, and the growth
and development of knowledge structures in general, its develop-
ment is continuous. Ergo, its behavioral manifestation does not
require the creation of new laws, neural structures, or mathemat-
ical functions to account for its appearance (see later sections
in this article). Consistent with our perspective, the development
of autobiographical memory does not necessitate the construc-
tion of a new memory system. Rather, autobiographical memory
can be integrated into an already evolving and dynamic memory
system, one whose growth is contingent upon the interplay of
continuity and discontinuity that characterizes development at
all levels of structure and processing.
 EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
Concerning the structure-process distinction, structures can
exist at various levels, ranging from hardware (e.g., neurological
structures such as the hippocampus) to software (e.g., knowl-
edge structures such as the cognitive self). The use of the term
structure to describe both hardware and software highlights the
fact that alterations in either can lead to catastrophic changes
in functioning. For example, a lesion in the hippocampus can
lead to profound retrograde amnesia just as the elimination of
a single link in a complex hierarchical knowledge structure can
lead to the inaccessibility of massive amounts of information
linked to that missing segment. Processes that operate on these
structures do so in part because of the very existence of the
structures and can in fact lead to alterations in the very structures
they serve. This dynamic interchange can be seen, for example,
in the synaptic and dendritic changes that result from experience,
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ones that alter the "wiring diagram" of the brain and have been
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specifically associated with learning. This alteration facilitates
new learning because it opens up new opportunities (pathways)
for encoding new experiences (e.g., Greenough, 1993;
Greenough, Black, & Wallace, 1987; Quartz & Sejnowski, in
press). As well, processes that lead to the formation and organi-
zation of categories may begin, at least when there is little
information concerning the category, by establishing a set of
linear relations. When additional information is infused into this
structure through acquisition processes, a linear series may no
longer be appropriate, and the structure may shift to one that is
hierarchical. Finally, some processes can operate on a number
of different structures. For example, the processes of encoding,
storage,' and retrieval as outlined in the section Integrating the
Self Into Models of Memory: A Dynamic View of Memory and
Retention operate on most, if not all, long-term memory traces.
Having established, at least in outline form, some of the
dynamic properties of this theory, we now turn to the main
business of explicating the details of our proposal more thor-
oughly. We begin with an overview of very young infant and
toddler memory development, one that continues from our ear-
lier article (Howe & Courage, 1993) and that we believe finally
puts to rest the notion that infantile amnesia is due to the devel-
opment of multiple memory systems. This is followed by argu-
ments concerning the amodal nature of memory and the role of
language as an expressive device, the primacy of the cognitive
self in the offset of infantile amnesia, and the role of receptive
language and gesture in communicating early memories. We then
outline a general model of memory, describe the development of
storage-maintenance skill in childhood memory in general, and
link it to the accrual of memories across the childhood years.
Finally, we describe methodological issues concerning the study
of early memory, including problems associated with differenti-
ating and defining autobiographical memory.
The Continuity of Memory Development
Early Memory and Memory Continuity
Extant literature on early memory development is replete with
examples of the infants' proficiency in encoding, storing, and
retrieving information. This evidence has been garnered with a
stunning array of procedures and paradigms and an assortment
501
of ingenious tasks that have harnessed the enormous curiosity
of the human infant whose response repertoire is limited by
perceptual, cognitive, and motor immaturities. For example, re-
searchers exploiting infants' visual responsiveness and robust
preference for novelty have used habituation, paired-compari-
son, and other familiarization procedures to show that even
neonates can recognize patterns seen previously (for reviews,
see Fagan, 1990; Rovee-Collier & Bhatt, 1993; Slater & Mor-
rison, 1991; J. Werner & Perlmutter, 1979). Baillargeon, DeVos,
and Graber (1989) employed visual preference to index immedi-
ate retention and established that 8-month-olds looked longer at
an impossible event than a possible event involving the displace-
ment of a toy seen 70 s earlier. Moreover, recognition is not
limited to the visual modality. Catherwood (1993) showed that
8-month-olds could retain information about the shape of an
object explored haptically over a 5-min retention interval, in
spite of the presence of interfering haptic stimuli. Swain, Zelazo,
and Clifton (1993) used habituation and recovery of a head-
turn response to demonstrate that neonates exposed postnatally
to speech sounds retained a memory for those sounds over a
24-hr interval. Finally, Cernoch and Porter (1985) found that
neonates could recognize their mothers axillary odor 12 hr fol-
lowing a familiarization procedure. Although studies using ha-
bituation and novelty preference procedures attest to the readi-
ness of the infant to begin processing information from its earli-
est days, these methods have certain limitations as procedures
to study long-term retention (see Rovee-Collier & Bhatt, 1993;
but see also Bahrick & Pickens, 1995).
Over the past decade a variety of alternative procedures more
appropriate to the study of long-term retention processes in the
preverbal child have been implemented. In the most comprehen-
sive investigation of infant memory to date, Rovee-Collier and
her colleagues employed a mobile conjugate reinforcement para-
digm to identify the factors that affect 2- to 6-month-olds' im-
mediate and long-term retention of an operant foot-kick re-
sponse. They found that 6-month-olds learned the basic contin-
gency faster than 2- and 3-month-olds and that despite similar
levels of performance at the end of acquisition, infant age and
the length of the retention interval were positively correlated.
Further, they found that as research with older children and
adults has shown, retention was affected by factors such as
amount and distribution of practice, the match between the prox-
imal (mobile) and distal (context) cues present at acquisition
and those at long-term retention, and exposure to reinstating or
interfering stimuli following simple forgetting and acquisition,
respectively (see Rovee-Collier & Bhatt, 1993; Rovee-Collier &
Shyi, 1992, for reviews). The operant conditioning paradigm
has also been effectively used to explore neonates' ability to
retain auditory information. DeCasper and his colleagues
showed that newborn infants can recognize the prosodic charac-
teristics of a prose passage heard in the last trimester of their
prenatal life and have identified a number of variables that affect
1
As an example of the dynamic interplay between structure and pro-
cess, the term storage is used to indicate both the structure that is
memory storage as well as the processes that lead to memory storage.
Whether we are referring to the structure or process aspect of storage
should be clear from the context throughout this article.
 502 HOWE AND COURAGE
their recognition of auditory stimuli (DeCasper & Prescott,
1984; DeCasper & Spence, 1986, 1991; M. J. Spence & Free-
man, 1996).
Infants' readiness to imitate motor activities performed by an
adult model has provided another window on the development
of long-term retention. Meltzoff and Moore (1994) demon-
strated that 6-week-oIds reproduce certain facial expressions
and head movements modeled by an adult and retain them over
a 24-hr retention interval. Further advances in infants' recall of
action sequences occur during the second half of the first postna-
tal year, at which time 9-month-olds' show deferred imitation
of novel object-specific actions witnessed (but not performed)
by them 24 hr earlier (Meltzoff, 1988b). Older, 14-month-olds
retained six novel actions in memory for 1 week following live
modeling (Meltzoff, 1988c) and for 24 hr following symbolic
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modeling using television (Meltzoff, 1988a). Recently, Meltzoff
(1995) found that 14- and 16-month-olds retained modeled mul-
tiple acts across 2- and 4-month retention intervals. A particular
strength of Meltzoff's research is that the novel activities were
modeled only briefly without verbal instruction and were not
performed by the infants themselves prior to the retention test.
As infants' limitation of the novel actions was based on the
stored representation of what they had seen previously, they are
assumed to index recall rather than simple recognition.
Using a similar paradigm, Bauer and her colleagues employed
elicited imitation to show that 11- to 24-month-olds represent
order information in their recall of two to five component event
sequences and that recall is facilitated and prolonged (to several
hours in the youngest infants and up to 6 weeks in the older
children) if the components of the events contain enabling rela-
tions, are familiar, and are accompanied by verbal cues at the
retention test (Bauer & Dow, 1994; Bauer & Hertsgaard, 1993;
Bauer & Mandler, 1989, 1992; Bauer & Shore, 1987; Bauer &
Thai, 1990; Bauer & Travis, 1993). Recently, Bauer, Hertsgaard,
and Dow (1994) reported that infants who were 13, 16, and 21
months old at the time of acquisition recalled some of these
event sequences after an 8-month retention interval.
Subsequent developments bring further sophistication to
young children's memory accomplishments, at which time im-
provements in performance may be due not to an increase in
memory hardware per se, but to a growing refinement in related
cognitive and representational processes. For example, De-
Loache and her colleagues found that 24- to 30-month-olds
were better than 18- to 22-month-olds at using landmark cues,
strategies such as rehearsal and monitoring, and spatial categori-
zation to aid the retrieval of hidden toys (DeLoache & Brown,
1983, 1984; DeLoache, Cassidy, & Brown, 1985; DeLoache &
Todd, 1988). Finally, studies of young children's memory for
both naturally occurring and contrived events that occurred dur-
ing their infant and toddler years are retained and under certain
conditions can persist for months or years, although with the
passage of time recollection of these events becomes increas-
ingly fragmentary. For example, McDonough and Mandler
(1994) found some evidence of recall of single object-specific
actions in groups of 2-year-olds who had participated in an
experiment when they were 11 months old. Ferris, Myers, and
Clifton (1990) found that certain aspects of a laboratory proce-
dure experienced when infants were 6 months old were recalled
1 and 2 years later. However, a longitudinal study of infants'
memories of a toy-play event experienced at home when they
were 10 and 14 months old and in a laboratory setting when
they were 32 and 60 months old, revealed progressively less
recollection of the event over time (Myers, Perris, & Speaker,
1994). Similarly Boyer, Barron, and Farrar (1994) failed to find
evidence of recollection of a nine-action event sequence learned
by 20-month-olds and tested after a 12- to 22-month delay.
Finally, in a recent investigation of children's memories for
injuries requiring emergency room treatment, Howe, Courage,
and Peterson (1994b) reported that children who were younger
than 2 years old expressed recollection of their accidents nonver-
bally after a 5-day retention interval but expressed very little
recall of the events 6 months later.
What is abundantly clear from this literature is that from their
earliest days infants can encode, store, and retrieve a variety of
information about the stimuli to which they are exposed and the
events they experience. Moreover, they can retain this informa-
tion over considerable periods of time. It is important to note,
however, that although infants and very young children retain
something of the events and experiences that have occurred in
their past, exactly what it is that they remember is an empirical
question. When children possess the narrative skills to talk about
events in relation to themselves at about 2-3 years of age, it is
clear that the events have been organized autobiographically in
memory. If, however, their recognition or recall of prior events
is expressed nonverbally or is limited to single words or simple
motor responses (as was the case in many of the studies cited
above), we cannot be sure that their behavior reflects anything
more than conditioned responding or reenacted motor sequences
cued by the experimental situation. Although these behaviors
are an important testament to the enduring effects of early expe-
rience, such evidence that very young children remember certain
aspects of their infant experiences should not obscure the fact
that what they actually remembered was sometimes fragmentary,
especially following protracted retention intervals.
Recently, several researchers (see Bauer, 1995; Mandler,
1990b; Meltzoff, 1990, 1995) have attempted to provide some
closure on this intractable problem by establishing criteria that
distinguish between nonverbal methods that simply provide evi-
dence of retention over time (e.g., novelty preference, operant
conditioning) and those that indicate recall of a specific event
provided in the absence of perceptual support for the event (e.g.,
deferred or elicited imitation). For example, visual recognition
memory inferred from a novelty preference test or from the
mobile conjugate reinforcement procedure does not unambigu-
ously index recall, as these procedures do not require infants to
generate actions based on stored representations. In contrast,
deferred and elicited imitation procedures require the infant to
reproduce an action or a sequence of actions that they witnessed
briefly (but did not perform) on an earlier occasion. As the
imitated responses are generated solely on the basis of stored
representations and cannot be attributed to recognition or proce-
dural learning, there is an emerging consensus that these tech-
niques are analogous to cued verbal recall used to assess recall
in older children and adults (see Bauer, 1995, Mandler, I990b,
and Meltzoff, 1990, for discussions). We return to this point
later (see Some Methodological Issues).
 EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
In any event, although the nature of infants' representational
processes is not well understood at present, there is evidence
that many of the mechanisms that govern storage and retrieval
processes in infancy are the same as those that regulate memory
processes in older children and adults. That is, infant and toddler
memory performance varies as a function of (a) the amount
and distribution of practice (see Rovee-Collier & Bhatt, 1993),
(b) organization (see Bauer, 1995), (c) reinstatement (Howe,
Courage, & Bryant-Brown, 1993), (d) postevent information
(Boiler, Grabelle, & Rovee-Collier, 1995; Rovee-Collier, Borza,
Adler, & Boiler, 1993), (e) retroactive interference (see Rovee-
Collier & Boiler, 1995), ( f ) conditions at encoding (e.g., encod-
ing specificity; see Rovee-Collier & Shyi, 1992), and (g) the
effect of retrieval on subsequent recall (e.g., test effects; Fi-
vush & Hamond, 1989; Myers et al., 1994), to name a few.
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All of these effects are well-known in the literatures on older
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children's and adults' memory (e.g., see Howe, 1988, 1991,
1995; Howe, Courage, & Bryant-Brown, 1993; Howe & O'Sul-
livan, in press; Marche & Howe, 1995; Schneider & Pressley,
1989). Although there is marked continuity in the functioning
of the human information-processing system across age (for a
similar view, see Bauer, Hertsgaard, & Wewerka, 1995), it is
equally clear that there are also substantial developmental ad-
vances in memory performance with age (e.g., faster encoding,
storage, and retrieval processes; increases in the ability to main-
tain information in storage for longer periods of time) that are
undoubtedly kindled by changes in other cognitive processes
(e.g., changes in knowledge, strategies, attentional processes,
metamemory).2
Perhaps the most important aspect of this continuity for our
thesis about the role of the cognitive self in the onset of autobio-
graphical memory, is the evidence that infants' memories show
many of the same organizational properties that characterize
memory processes in older children and adults. For example,
the work of Bauer and her colleagues indicates that from at least
11 months, infants encode temporal order in their representation
of event sequences and use it to guide recall and that the presen-
tation of a verbal cue at retention also facilitates retrieval
(Bauer & Dow, 1994; Bauer & Hertsgaard, 1993; Bauer &
Mandler, 1989, 1992; Bauer & Shore, 1987; Bauer & Thai,
1990). In addition, studies by Rovee-Collier show that infants
encode contextual information into their memories of the mobile
conjugate reinforcement procedure and that the presence of
these cues at retention exert a powerful influence on memory
performance (see Rovee-Collier & Shyi, 1992). Finally, there
is ample evidence that, at encoding, from about 3 months infants
categorize stimuli on the basis of perceptual similarity and by
about 9 months on the basis of conceptual similarity (e.g., Ei-
mas & Quinn, 1994; Hayne, Rovee-Collier, & Ferris, 1987;
Mandler, Fivush, & Reznicfc, 1987; Mandler & McDonough,
1993; Quinn, 1994; Roberts, 1988; Roberts & Cuff, 1989).
Although it has been documented that categories are highly
effective in organizing memory in older children and adults
(e.g., Howe, Brainerd, & Kingma, 1985; Schneider & Pressley,
1989), their role in organizing memory and facilitating long-
term recall in infants has not been addressed directly. Similarly,
although infants are sensitive to spatial location (Baillargeon
et al., 1989; Diamond, 1985; J. Huttenlocher, Newcombe, &
503
Sandberg, 1994) the potential usefulness of these cues in facili-
tating recall has not been explored systematically (but see De-
Loache & Todd, 1988). Thus, information provided by temporal
order, verbal labels, context, categorization, and spatial location
are encoded in infants' representations of events and can poten-
tially serve to organize memory and facilitate recall as they do
for older children and adults. (Later, we argue that the self is
like these other organizers in its mnemonic function. For now,
our point is simply that very early memory shares much in
common with memory in older children and adults.)
The view that many of the basic memory processes are funda-
mentally continuous across development is contrary to the con-
ventional view of infant memory as discontinuous and qualita-
tively different from that of older children and adults. Those who
hold this view look to research with animals, verbally proficient
humans, and clinical case studies of human amnesics to argue
that there are (at least) two structurally, functionally, and devel-
opmentally different memory systems. The first and most primi-
tive system is said to dominate infant memory for the first 2
years of life and has been variously described as an "early"
(Schacter & Moscovitch, 1984), "procedural" (Nadel & Zola-
Morgan, 1984; Squire, 1987), "implicit" (Schacter, 1987), or
a "habit" (Bachevalier, 1991; Bachevalier & Mishkin, 1984)
system capable only of retaining the perceptual and motor skills
demonstrated by conditioning and short-term recognition mem-
2
Throughout this article, we frequently ascribe changes in memory
performance in childhood to underlying cognitive advances. This is be-
cause there is an enormous literature that provides direct evidence that
such advances in many aspects of memory performance are causally
linked to these underlying changes in cognitive structures and processes
(e.g., Bjorklund, 1995; Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993; Schneider &
Pressley, 1989). This emphasis on changes in software does not, how-
ever, preclude the contribution of alterations in hardware to memory
development. For example, mylenization and consequent changes in the
rate of neural transmission may well be related to changes in speed of
information processing (e.g., see Case, 1995), including rates of encod-
ing and retrieval. Similarly, neurological development of the frontal lobes
has been linked to advances in inhibitory processes that have been
associated, in turn, with increasing proficiency in many areas of cogni-
tive development (see chapters in Dempster & Brainerd, 1995). Finally,
mature neural connectivity is achieved by both progressive dendritic
arborization and regressive pruning (e.g., Chugani, Phelps, & Mazziotti,
1987; P. R. Huttenlocher & De Courten, 1987), events that have been
linked to advances in learning (e.g., Greenough, 1993). Although these
advances in hardware are substantial, and their contribution to cognitive
development undoubtedly significant, direct and causal links have yet
to be established between specific changes at the level of hardware and
specific advances in cognitive performance. In any event, the existence
of causal links between neurological developments and memory perfor-
mance does not pose a problem for our dynamic model in which ad-
vances in neural hardware as well as in cognitive software are both
related to changes at the level of performance. Our point is simply that
(a) at the current time, these links are better established empirically for
software than hardware changes, (b) it is very unlikely that dramatic
shifts in hardware underlie the establishment of autobiographical mem-
ory late in the 2nd year of life, and (c) changes in hardware are not
likely to target autobiographical memory in isolation, but rather, as the
examples given here indicate, are likely to affect many aspects of our
cognitive functioning.
 504 HOWE AND COURAGE
ory procedures. In contrast, the memory system of older children
and adults has been described as "later," "declarative," "ex-
plicit,' ' or a ' 'memory'' system, respectively, capable of storing
information about experiences and events that are available (or
accessible) to conscious recollection and verbal report. Clearly,
however, the weight of the evidence reviewed here on early
memory does not support a multiple memory approach (see
Howe & Courage, 1993, for a discussion of these and other
related issues). Consistent with other recent approaches (e.g.,
Bauer et al., 1995), we believe the evidence squares best with
the idea that the underlying processes controlling memory devel-
opment are continuous with age, although changes in levels of
performance may appear discontinuous.
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Neuroscience and Memory Continuity
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
Although we have argued that there is a fundamental continu-
ity in basic memory processes (encoding, storage, retrieval)
across development, this is not to imply that the diverse exam-
ples of mnemonic competence (variously assessed through rec-
ognition, recall, or savings measures) that we have described are
created equal in their cognitive prerequisites, their neurological
substrates, or their developmental course. In fact, in a recent
review and analysis of the literature on the relationship between
tasks commonly used to assess infant memory and their hypothe-
sized prerequisite neural correlates, C. A. Nelson (1995) has
fashioned a persuasive argument to the contrary. Drawing on
diverse evidence from the clinical literature on adults with brain
injuries (and memory impairment), experimental analogues to
brain injury conditions provided by lesioning nonhuman spe-
cies, and the developmental literature documenting memory per-
formance in immature human (intact) and nonhuman (lesioned
and intact) subjects, he argued for the existence of multiple
memory systems with different developmental time courses.
Specifically, he contends that certain neurological structures that
develop early in postnatal life (e.g., the hippocampus, striatum,
cerebellum, olivary-cerebellar complex) are sufficient to sustain
a "pre-explicit" or procedural memory system that makes pos-
sible the types of recognition memory performance expressed
in certain early novelty preferences, habituation, instrumental
and classical conditioning, and visual expectancy tasks. In con-
trast, performance on certain other "explicit" memory tasks
(e.g., delayed nonmatch to sample, cross-modal recognition,
deferred and elicited imitation) and working memory tasks
(e.g., A-not-B, delayed response), depend, in addition, on later
developing structures of the medial temporal lobe (e.g., the
amygdala), inferior temporal cortical regions, and regions of
the prefrontal cortex, which do not begin to come on-line in
human infants until the latter half of the first postnatal year. Far
from being complete, these structures continue to mature across
infancy and childhood and, in tandem with other cognitive and
linguistic achievements, underlie the significant improvements
in memory performance evidenced during these early years.
Critical to the issue at hand, C. A. Nelson argued that the last
half of the first postnatal year marks a qualitative shift in the
development of early memory that is coincident with (or perhaps
enabled by) qualitative changes in neurological maturation in
regions of the developing brain. This shift from early functioning
based on a pre-explicit memory system to the onset of an explicit
memory system that occurs between 6 and 12 months of age,
supposedly heralds (among other things) the onset of recall in
infancy. However, with this time frame in mind, it is difficult to
reconcile the necessity of such a qualitative shift with the recent
findings of Meltzoff and Moore (1994), who reported that 6-
week-old infants showed deferred imitation of facial expres-
sions after a 24-hr delay. They argued that this demonstration
of recall memory establishes that infants can generate motor
actions on the basis of stored representations, an achievement
heretofore reserved for developmentally more advanced infants
(but seeAnisfeld, 1996).
To the extent that the crux of C. A. Nelson's (1995.) argument
is that different kinds of memory performance are supported by
different neural substrates, both of which have parallel develop-
mental histories, his case is cogent. However, not everyone
would agree that the evidence that he has presented justifies the
stronger claim that there are different and possibly independent
memory systems underlying the varieties of memory perfor-
mance he discusses (e.g., Roediger, Rajaram, & Srinivas, 1990;
Rovee-Collier, 1990). In fact, as C. A. Nelson himself points
out, the relationship between brain structure and memory func-
tion is not strictly isomorphic and that more important, regard-
less of age, memory behavior, or species, the brain works as an
integrated system receiving inputs from and outputting to both
local and distal structures.
The nature of this integrated neurocognitive system is cur-
rently the subject of active research, the results of which will
serve both to update our knowledge and provoke revisions to
extant hypotheses about memory processes and their neurologi-
cal substrates. As an example, until relatively recently, the hippo-
campus (and its related structures in the medial temporal re-
gion) was believed to be a late-developing structure, the delayed
maturation of which was considered the likely candidate for the
late onset of an explicit or declarative memory system (Nadel &
Zola-Morgan, 1984; Schacter & Moscovitch, 1984). However,
there is now evidence that the hippocampus and its surrounding
structures (with the exception of the dentate area, where devel-
opment is protracted over the first 3 or 4 postnatal years) in
human and nonhuman primates matures relatively early in post-
natal life (Berger & Alvarez, 1994; Chugani. 1994; Chugani &
Phelps, 1986; Kretschmann, Kammradt, Krauthausen, Sauer, &
Wingert, 1986; O'Neil, Friedman, Bachevalier, & Ungerleider,
1986) and is sufficient to mediate the simple, reflexive novelty
preferences demonstrated in the infancy period. However, al-
though components of the hippocampal formation become func-
tional in early infancy, certain neocortical (e.g., inferotemporal)
components and their reciprocal connections with the hippocam-
pus develop more slowly (Bachevalier, Brickson, & Hagger,
1993; Bachevalier & Mishkin, 1984). These later developing
structures operating in synergy with the hippocampus mediate
performance on more complex memory tasks that evolve over
the period of infancy (e.g., cross-modal recognition, deferred
imitation, and delayed nonmatch to sample). Thus, although
the hippocampus plays a changing role in mediating memory
performance, it may also contribute to the underlying continuity
of memory processes.
In addition, only a revision to the currently accepted assump-
 EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
tions about the memory abilities or systems that are lost (i.e.,
declarative or explicit) or spared (i.e., procedural or implicit)
in amnesia can account for the recently reported demonstration
of the acquisition of new declarative memories in patients with
amnesia (Hamann & Squire, 1995). These authors reported that
under conditions of study-only as opposed to the more usual
study-test, patients with amnesia acquired new word knowl-
edge (albeit slowly) and that this knowledge generalized and
persisted over a 1-month delay period. What this implies is that
in spite of their brain pathologies, which included damage to
the integrity of the medial temporal lobe and the midline dience-
phalic structures, an alteration in the conditions of learning
ameliorated the normally pervasive deficits to declarative mem-
ory apparent in patients with amnesia.
It is evident that our knowledge of the structure-function
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relationships of human memory is itself in a state of develop-
ment and that the question of whether or not there are multiple
memory systems is unresolved. However, as we have maintained
previously, in the absence of incontrovertible evidence to the
contrary, it is simply more parsimonious to consider the develop-
ment of memory in infancy in terms of a unitary memory sys-
tem, one that underlies the continuity of memory processes that
we have documented (see Howe & Courage, 1993, for further
discussion). In any event, we wish to emphasize that C. A.
Nelson's (1995) perspective on the development of infant mem-
ory, with its critical qualitative shift to the onset of an explicit
memory system in the last half of the 1 st postnatal year, in no
way undermines our contention that the offset of infantile amne-
sia and the onset of autobiographical memory, which occurs
considerably later at about 2 years of age, is not mediated by a
qualitative shift in neurological development.
Amodal Nature of Memory and the Role of Language
As the infant-memory literature illustrates so clearly, language
is not necessary in order to represent information in memory.
In fact, evidence from learning in newborns (e.g., Kaye &
Bower, 1994) as well as older infants (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1984;
Meltzoff & Borton, 1979; Meltzoff & Moore, 1994) indicates
that early memory is amodal. Similar arguments have been for-
warded in the later-childhood and adult-memory literatures such
that information is not only thought to be stored amodally but
also in a nonlinguistic format. Although it is by no means clear
precisely what form memory representations take—neural nets
(e.g., White, 1992), proposition lists (e.g., Anderson, 1978),
feature vectors (e.g., Flexser & Tulving, 1978), connectionist
networks (e.g., Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Hanson & Burr, 1990),
and other distributed memory systems (e.g., Murdock, 1982) —
it has become obvious over the past few decades that this age-
old problem cannot be resolved by using language-based repre-
sentational units at any age (e.g., see Anderson, 1978, 1979;
Palmer, 1978; Pylyshyn, 1979). In fact, as Mandler (1992) and
others (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) have pointed out, concep-
tual representational systems are present and operating well
before language is available for the expression of those concepts.
Indeed, the acquisition of various linguistic terms is predicated
on the child having previously formed concepts to which lin-
guistic units refer (e.g., Mandler, 1992).
505
Essentially, then, information defining a concept is repre-
sented without reference to the modality through which it was
experienced and without reference to its lexical entry. Although
lexical entries, as well as other information including instruc-
tions on how to form images of the construct, may be linked to
the representation that stands for the concept (or at least "lo-
cated" nearby that representation), these instruction sets do not
define the concept. Rather, they simply represent ways in which
the concept can be encoded and decoded. That is, information
can be input and output in spatial (imaginal) or serial (verbal)
formats (among others), but these formats should not be con-
fused with the way in which these concepts are represented in
memory.
Given that we accept this difference between symbols
(words) and the things they stand for in memory, the question
remains, what is the role of language in memory in general, and
what is its role in autobiographical memory in particular? What
the literature seems to indicate is that language facilitates the
organized expression of memory output (narrative), autobio-
graphical and otherwise. However, we must again be careful not
to confuse the form of output with the original representation
of that information in memory. That is, although language can
convey the contents of memory, as do other modes of expression
(e.g., gesturing, mathematical equations, art), the expression
need not be isomorphic with the memory representation. Thus,
the often-noted correlation between improvements in autobio-
graphical recall and children's narrative skill may simply reflect
increases in children's ability to express their memories, not
necessarily improvements in the memories themselves! As we
(and others) have pointed out elsewhere (Bauer, 1993; Howe &
Courage, 1993; Mandler, 1990a), because verbal recall is typi-
cally the only measure of autobiographical memory that is used,
it is no wonder that improvements in narrative skill were seen
as indicative of improvements in autobiographical memory itself
rather than improvements in children's expressive capacity.
Of course, to the extent that language (or the lexical unit) is
associated with the representation of a concept in memory, there
is the possibility that language, like other cues (e.g., temporal
order [Bauer & Dow, 1994], context [Rovee-Collier & Shyi,
1992]), can serve to redintegrate or reinstate the trace at the
time of recall. Such verbal reinstatement has been shown in
young children (e.g., Howe, Courage, & Bryant-Brown, 1993).
Although "narrative rehearsal" of events, for example with a
parent, should have similar effects, it is not known at this time
whether they, in fact, do (e.g., see Fivush, 1994; Goodman,
Quas, Batterman-Faunce, Riddlesberger, & Kuhn, 1994). In
fact, it is well known that reconstructions of events through
conversations with others often result in distortions of fact, ones
that are consistent with the recaller's and to some extent the
listener's current beliefs and expectations (e.g., D. P. Spence,
1982; Wagenaar, 1988, 1990).
The Emergence of the Cognitive Self, Not Language,
Portends Autobiographical Memory
Emergence of the Cognitive Self
When children are about 18 to 24 months old, a new organizer,
the cognitive self, becomes available to facilitate autobiographi-
 506 HOWE AND COURAGE
cal recall. We have argued that only with this achievement do
event memories become organized autobiographically. Although
conjecture about the nature and function of the self has a long
and hoary tradition, and remains an elusive concept with a multi-
plicity of definitions, its developmental course is still the focus
of active research (e.g., Cicchetti & Beeghly, 1990; Damon &
Hart, 1988; Kopp & Brownell, 1991; Neisser, 1993). Years of
reflection from theorists of diverse perspectives (Bowlby, 1969;
Darwin, 1877; Freud, 1959; James, 1961; Mahler, Pine, & Berg-
man, 1975; Mead, 1934; Piaget, 1954) has yielded a consensus
on two important issues still germane to modern developmental
theories of the self. First, most agree that at birth infants are
probably unaware of their separateness from the environment
and acquire this awareness following a gradual process of indi-
viduation, which likely begins in the early weeks of life (Melt-
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zoff, 1990; Neisser, 1993). Second, there exist at least two
fundamental (though complexly interrelated) facets of the self,
the /, a subjective sense of the self as a thinker, knower, and
causal agent, and the me, an objective sense of the self with
the unique and recognizable features and characteristics that
constitute one's self-concept (but see Neisser, 1988, for an alter-
native perspective on the facets of the self that focuses on infor-
mation analysis). The mechanisms and processes underlying the
growing awareness of the self in both (all) its aspects are the
subject of investigation in both theoretical and empirical do-
mains (Bullock & Lutkenhaus, 1990; Case, 1991; Cicchetti,
1991; Damon & Hart, 1982, 1988; Emde, Biringen, Clyman, &
Oppenheim, 1991; Harter, 1983; Lewis, 1991; Lewis & Brooks-
Gunn, 1979; Meltzoff, 1990; Neisser, 1991; Pipp, Fischer, &
Jennings, 1987). As a detailed consideration of this literature
is beyond the scope of this article and has been reviewed in
greater detail elsewhere (Howe & Courage, 1993), we restrict
ourselves to a-summary of the critical features of this research.
Until recently, empirical investigation of the self in infancy
has focused almost exclusively on the self ax object of experi-
ence (i.e., the me). Particular attention has been paid to the
development of visual self-recognition assessed by observing
the infants' reactions to their images in mirrors, photos, and
movies (Amsterdam, 1972; Berenthal & Fischer, 1978; Bul-
lock & Lutkenhaus, 1990; Darwin, 1877; Dixon, 1957; Johnson,
1983; Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979; Lewis, Brooks-Gunn, &
Jaskir, 1985; Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989; Pipp et
al., 1987; Preyer, 1893; Priel & De Schonen, 1986; Schulman &
Kaplowitz, 1977). Collectively, these studies reveal that from
about 3 months of age infants are both attentive and positive
toward their mirror image and within several months can dis-
criminate their facial features from that of another infant (Fadil,
Moss, & Bahrick, 1993). By about 9 months they begin to
show awareness of the contingency cues provided by the tandem
movement of the image with themselves and use these cues for
play and imitation. They also know something of the reflective
properties of mirrors and turn to locate spatially objects and
people that they see reflected. Ml self-recognition of the mirror
image as their own occurs at about 18 months of age when
infants first respond to a spot of rouge that has been covertly
applied to their noses by touching their own noses rather than the
mirror image. Coincident with mark-directed behavior, infants
begin to show self-consciousness (shy smiling, gaze aversion,
and self-touching) when confronted with their images and. by
about 22 months of age, correctly label the image. Collectively,
these behaviors provide a consistent picture of an infant who
recognizes the mirror image as me.
It should be noted that visual self-recognition is only one
facet of the self-concept, one that is relatively easy to operationa-
lize for research with infants. The self-concept (and self-aware-
ness) implies more than recognition of one's physical features
and is a fundamental aspect of social cognitive development that
has nascent roots in the early weeks of life and continued evolu-
tion throughout childhood and adolescence (see Damon & Hart,
1988, for a review). However, many authors agree that the
achievement of mirror self-recognition marks an important de-
velopmental milestone in the 2nd year of life (Asendorpf &
Baudonniere, 1993; Butterworth, 1990; Kagan, 1981; Lewis,
1986; Meltzoff, 1990; Neisser, 1993) and that a critical step is
reached when children are able to represent themselves as an
object of knowledge and imagination. Thus mark-directed be-
havior reflects more than self-recognition per se and may, in
fact, signal a more pervasive transition in cognitive development
(also see Karmiloff-Smith, 1992).
In contrast to the substantial corpus of research on the self
ax object of knowledge (the me), empirical work on the self as
subject of experience (the /) has been slower to accrue. Al-
though it is widely recognized that this aspect of the self is
fundamental to infants' growing self-awareness and sense of
agency (e.g., Kagan, 1981), and that its development must be
explicated for a full understanding of the self system, it has
been more difficult to operationalize. Only relatively recently,
have researchers devised a variety of "self-involvement-in-ac-
tion" tasks (i.e., those in which the child recognizes the out-
come as a product of his or her own participation) that articulate
this aspect of the self as subject of experience more precisely
(Bullock & Lutkenhaus, 1990; Meltzoff, 1990; Pipp et al.,
1987). In spite of the paucity of empirical work, speculation
has been rampant that the infant's sense of self as subject of
experience commences long before the onset of self-recognition,
and has primitive origins in the processes of sensory perception,
self-control (e.g., Butterworth, 1990; Neisser, 1993), and imita-
tion (Meltzoff, 1990) in the early weeks and months of life.
Although a detailed review of this literature is beyond the scope
of this article, we provide a brief overview of some recent
theoretical perspectives along with supporting empirical re-
search on the development of the self as subject of experience.
Current theories of the early development of the / aspect of
the self vary in the emphasis placed on the primacy of percep-
tual, social, and affective factors in the structuring of this "pre-
symbolic" self in the 1st year of life (see Cicchetti & Beeghly,
1990; Kopp & Brownell, 1991; Neisser, 1993, for reviews).
One of the most comprehensive treatments of the subject has
been provided by Neisser (1988, 1993) who proposed a cogni-
tive analysis of the self based on the varieties of information to
which infants (and older children and adults) have access, each
of which specifies a different type of self. Of particular relevance
to the period of infancy are the ecological self (an awareness
of where one is, what one is doing, and what one has done)
and the interpersonal self (awareness of social affordances in
interaction with others). These have their origins early in in-
 EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
fancy and are fundamentally rooted in perception and perceptual
processes (see J. J. Gibson, 1966). For example, data relevant
to the ecological self come from studies showing infants' dis-
crimination of and responsiveness to looming objects (Carroll &
Gibson, 1981), parallel flow in the optic array specifying real
(Lee & Aronson, 1974) or illusory (Butterworth, 1990) move-
ment, occlusion (Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman, 1985),
and perceptual affordances (E. J. Gibson et al., 1987). The
foundations of at least a rudimentary interpersonal self in the
early months of life can be witnessed in infants' imitation of
facial expressions (Meltzoff & Moore, 1994), protoconvers-
ations (Bateson, 1975), and affective exchanges with their care-
takers (Stern, 1985, 1993). A third aspect of the self (although
not directly perceived), is the conceptual self, which enables
infants to begin to take themselves as objects of thought. The
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ability to think explicitly about oneself probably begins to
emerge with the realization that one is the object of another
person's attention, an achievement unlikely to appear before the
end of the 1 st year. At this time, shared attention to objects and
events becomes a common mode of parent—child interaction
(Tomasello, 1993; Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993), an activ-
ity that serves to foster the infant's nascent understanding of
what other people are attending to or talking about—the object
of attention sometimes being the child himself or herself.
Another contemporary viewpoint has been contributed by
Meltzoff (1990). He has argued that studies of (a) social mir-
roring (in which 14-month-old infants preferentially attended
to adults who imitated their actions), (b) social modeling (in
which infants from birth are able to imitate certain modeled
actions), and (c) self-practice (in which infants use imitation
to represent information to the self through reenactment of past
events) provide insights into the origins of the self that are
rooted in the rudimentary imitative skills of the neonate. These
provide a foundation from which subsequent development of
the self proceeds. He has suggested that beyond this, imitative
interchanges between infants and others provide a unique vehicle
for elaborating the similarity between self and other, as well as
for the understanding that others, like the self, have thoughts,
intentions, and feelings. Like Neisser's (1993) vision of the
conceptual self, these insights can be considered as primitive
building blocks for the child's developing theory of the mind.
In sum, contemporary theories of the development of the self
are consistent in the position that important foundations of the
development of the self-as-subject are evident in early infancy,
perhaps from birth. Although the two aspects of the self system
develop in tandem over the first 2 years, by the time the infant
shows mirror self-recognition she or he already has a healthy
self-awareness (see Butterworth, 1990).
To date, the issue of precisely how the various facets of the
self become integrated into a full self system developmentally
has not been completely explicated. However, what is critical
to our thesis that a sense of self is fundamental to the develop-
ment of autobiographical memory is that by 18-24 months,
infants have a concept of themselves that is sufficiently viable
to serve as a referent around which personally experienced
events can be organized in memory. In fact, the contributors to
a special issue of Developmental Review, ' 'Development of the
Self" (Kopp & Brownell, 1991) concur that a significant
507
change in one's sense of self occurs at about this time. Although
the exact nature of this change remains elusive, it is clear that
the self at this point achieves whatever critical mass is necessary
to serve as an organizer and regulator of experience (also see
Emde et al., 1991; Kagan, 1981). The fact that this achieve-
ment in self-awareness (recognition) is followed shortly by the
onset of autobiographical memory is, we believe, more than
coincidental.
As we pointed out earlier, we view the establishment of the
cognitive self as no different than the establishment of other
conceptual categories or knowledge structures that serve to or-
ganize memories. That is, although the cognitive self permits
event memories to become personally organized with respect
to me, this is no different from children's ability to organize
information about "dogginess" with memories of other ani-
mals. And, like most other concepts and categories acquired
early in life, the self emerges prior to the use of productive
language about that concept. For example, 9-month-old infants
can acquire the concept of animal prior to the use of language
for that category (e.g., Mandler & McDonough, 1993; Roberts,
1988). As Slobin (1985) points out, children must already have
concepts of objects and events, as well as relational notions
about them, in order for language to be acquired (also see
Mandler, 1992). In a similar vein, Bates (1990) noted that the
acquisition of any natural language requires a preexisting theory
of self. Consistent with this view, and as we have argued else-
where (Howe & Courage, 1993), the concept of the self pre-
cedes any elaboration children might achieve once mastery of
the language enables them to think and talk about 7 and to
elaborate their categorical knowledge of me. These requisite
linguistic achievements begin with the emergence of the pro-
nominal references to /, me, and you, which appear in a child's
productive vocabulary between 22-24 months (Fenson et al.,
1994) and, as longitudinal studies have shown, about a month
after the achievement of visual self-recognition (Berenthal &
Fischer, 1978; Bullock & Lutkenhaus, 1990; Lewis & Brooks-
Gunn, 1979; Pipp et al., 1987).
Autobiographical Memory Subsequent to the
Emergence of the Self
There is a substantial literature that shows that toddlers begin
to recount their memories of personally experienced (i.e., auto-
biographical) events as soon as they acquire the rudiments of
productive language, even before they have reliable control over
the use of past-tense markers (e.g., "I see big fish," following
a trip to the aquarium). In one of the earliest studies of toddlers'
recollections, Sachs (1983) reported the case of Naomi, who
began to talk about events in her immediate past when she was
17 months old and about more distant events when she was 26
months old. Similarly, K. Nelson (1989) reported that 21-
month-old Emily's spontaneous narratives from the crib con-
tained numerous references first to routine and later (after she
was 25 months old) to specific personal events that had hap-
pened. In a longitudinal study of 5 toddlers between 24 and 31
months of age. Miller and Sperry (1988) noted that all of the
children were able to recount events that had happened at least
1 day previously. Further, over the 7-month interval, the toddlers'
 508 HOWE AND COURAGE
rate of talk about personal experiences doubled, their production
of temporally ordered sequences increased substantially, and
they provided more information spontaneously. Interestingly,
these early narratives were primarily about negative events and
often contained evaluative content (e.g., "Me big fall down"),
although much of this evaluation was conveyed nonverbally
through gesture. More recently, Howe et al. (1994b) reported
that 2-year-old children were able to provide coherent and de-
tailed recall of traumatic injuries and ensuing emergency room
treatments that they had experienced several days previously.
The children's recall (at least for the central details of the inci-
dents) was still robust when tested 6 and 12 months later (Howe
et al., 1994a, 1994b). Fivush, Gray, and Fromhoff (1987) inter-
viewed 2.5-year-olds about a variety of novel events (e.g., a trip
to the zoo) that they had experienced either in the recent (less
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than 3 months) or more distant (more than 3 months) past.
Although the children recalled information about only half of
the events probed, what they did recall was highly accurate.
Further, there was no difference in the amount recalled at the
two times. Finally, Hudson (1993) found that 24- to 30-month-
olds recalled specific information about events that had occurred
up to 10 months previously, including one 26-month-old child
who recalled an event that had occurred when she was just 1
year old. Although these studies indicate that toddlers have accu-
rate and durable recall of personally experienced events, their
reports are often fragmentary and heavily dependent on ques-
tions and prompts from the listener to elicit additional detail
available in memory but not spontaneously reported.
In contrast, older preschoolers and school-age children pro-
vide better structured and more cohesive narrative recollections
(i.e., containing more referential detail, orienting information,
evaluative comment, use of temporal markers) about personally
experienced events than do younger children, and further, they
require less prompting and support from the listener to do so
(see Fivush, 1993; Fivush, Haden, & Adam, 1995). However,
as memorial abilities are confounded with linguistic proficiency
and narrative skill in studies of autobiographical memory across
the preschool years, it is not clear whether (or to what extent)
older children's recall of personal events is superior.to that of
younger children or is simply an artifact of their more advanced
narrative skills. For example, Hamond and Fivush (1990) found
no effect of age (2.5 or 4.5 years) or retention interval (6 months
or 18 months) on either the accuracy or amount of children's
recall of a trip to Disney world. Similarly, Sheingold and Tenney
(1982) found no effect of age or retention interval on children's
recall of the birth of a sibling. In contrast, other researchers have
found developmental differences in the amount, consistency, and
durability (but not the accuracy) of information recalled (Fi-
vush, 1993; Howe et al., 1994a, 1994b; Pillemer & White, 1989;
Todd & Perlmutler, 1980). However, future research may con-
firm that the discrepancy is more apparent than real, perhaps
attributable to procedural differences such that the amount of
structure provided (e.g., free versus cued recall), the distinc-
tiveness of the event in question (e.g., unique versus routine),
the type of information considered (e.g., central or peripheral),
or interviewer variables (e.g., mother versus stranger). Interest-
ingly, in spite of the debate over whether younger children recall
less than older children or simply report less, there is little
disagreement that what younger children recall is highly accu-
rate and durable over considerable periods of time.
In spite of the impressive evidence of very young children's
recall of personally experienced events, there are those who
argue that autobiographical memory does not emerge until the
late preschool years (K. Nelson, 1989, 1993; Perner & Huffman,
1995; Pillemer & White, 1989). This proposition that autobio-
graphical memory undergoes a protracted period of development
has its origin in two different theoretical perspectives. Critical
to these is the assumption that there is a fundamental distinction
between event memory and autobiographical memory, one that
rests on the child's acquisition of sophisticated representational
skills that permit him or her to ". . . use the verbal representa-
tion of another person to set up a representation in one's own
mental representation system, thus recognizing the verbal ac-
count as a reinstatement of one's prior experience" (K. Nelson,
1993, p. 12), or to possess autonoetic (i.e., self-knowing) con-
sciousness such that "to remember something as experienced
requires there to be a mental representation of the fact that the
event is known because it has been experienced" (Perner &
Ruffman, 1995, p. 543). Thus, in the former (social interaction)
model, autobiographical memory evolves in the wake of conver-
sational interactions between the child and significant others:
in particular, elaborative mothers. As a consequence, the child
acquires narrative skills that, over and above providing an outlet
for the reporting of personal experiences, serve to structure
how these experiences are represented in memory. In the latter
(autonoetic) model, autobiographical memory becomes possi-
ble only following achievements in metacognition, whereby chil-
dren are able to have recollective experiences of remembering
(as opposed to simply knowing about) past events. According to
Perner and Ruffman, such recollective experiences are unlikely
before the age of 3-5 years because before that age children
do not understand the relationship between informational access
(e.g., seeing) and knowledge. Although Perner and Ruffman do
not specify the mechanism or mechanisms that might underlie
this metacognitive advance, they suggest that the social interac-
tion model in general, and mothers' elaborated talk about past
episodes in particular, might well play a significant role in the
evolution of autonoetic consciousness, autobiographical mem-
ory, and in children's developing theory of the mind.
Although both of these models may be correct in describing
subsequent software developments that may lead to increases in
storage maintenance of autobiographical memories, they do not
provide an explanation for the lower limit or onset of personal-
ized memories. Further, despite the growth of interest in the
experiential aspect of autobiographical remembering (the auto-
noetic component), it is not clear that such an experience is
critical to the establishment of autobiographical memory.
Clearly, although any complete theory of autobiographical mem-
ory must incorporate this experience of remembering (e.g., see
Conway, 1996), the existence of personalized memories is not
contingent on such experiencing.
Receptive Language and Gesturing
We have argued throughout this article that the recognition
of the cognitive self is the critical event that launches autobio-
 EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
graphical memory and that subsequent achievements in produc-
tive language provide an expressive outlet for these memories
that serve to preserve (through reinstatement) or could poten-
tially alter (through reconstructive processes) memory records
of personally experienced events. However, it would be naive to
assume that language development commences with its produc-
tion in speech. There is extensive documentation that infants are
receptive to (and can remember) linguistic input from the last
trimester of their prenatal life (DeCasper & Spence, 1986). In
addition, they are remarkably proficient in the perception and
discrimination of speech contrasts and attentive to aspects of
language that facilitate subsequent achievements in comprehen-
sion and production late in the 1st postnatal year (Aslin, Pi-
soni, & Jusczyk, 1983; DeCasper & Spence, 1986; Kuhl, 1987).
Further, there is evidence that in many areas of language develop-
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ment comprehension of word, grammatical form, and gesture
predates their production in speech and action (see Bates,
O'Connell, & Shore, 1987, for a review). Given this early pre-
disposition to process and remember linguistic forms, it be-
hooves us to consider whether the self might be represented in
receptive language or gesture (e.g., self-pointing) prior to its
appearance in visual self-recognition when the infant is about
18 months and in productive language at about 22 months.
To anticipate the outcome of the brief overview of the litera-
ture on receptive language and gesture that follows, we provide
evidence that just as comprehension precedes production in lan-
guage development in general, comprehension (or receptive un-
derstanding) of the sense of self (as evidenced in mirror self-
recognition and, coincidentally, in self-pointing and the compre-
hension of self-referent pronouns) precedes its production in
spoken language about the self by several months. Further, we
contend that this discrepancy between nonverbal comprehension
and verbal expression marks a transition in the development of
the infant's concept of me, a period during which the cognitive
and linguistic components of the self as object are being compre-
hended, organized, and consolidated. Finally, we argue that only
when this consolidation has occurred will the self be sufficiently
viable to serve as an organizer for autobiographical memory.
More than coincidentally, we believe, it is at this time that young
children begin to tell us about the personal events of their lives
that they recall.
Although infants are able to discriminate speech units with
increasing sophistication in the first 6 months of life, it is not
until about 8 or 9 months that they show comprehension of the
meaning of words (Bates et al., 1987; Fenson et al., 1994;
Goldin-Meadow, Seligman, & Gelman, 1976; Oviatt, 1985)
such that by 13 months they have a receptive vocabulary of
about 17-97 words (but see Tomasello & Mervis, 1994, for
some scepticism). In any event, by their first birthday infants
can readily acquire (and express in visual recognition and in
pointing) new word meanings through instruction (Oviatt, 1985;
Reznick & Goldfield, 1992; Woodward, Markman, & Fitzsim-
mons, 1994), an achievement that anticipates a vocabulary spurt
in language comprehension that parallels the spurt in production
(Reznick & Goldfield, 1992). However, although parental re-
ports indicate that infants recognize their own names at about
8 months (which does not in and of itself signal mature recogni-
tion of the self), there is little evidence of the comprehension
509
of self-referent pronouns before about 18 months (Fenson et
al., 1994). More important, it is also in this time frame that
words comprehended, but not spoken, can cue preverbal infants'
recall of temporally ordered events (Bauer & Hertsgaard, 1993),
thus revealing a function for receptive language in the organiza-
tion of event retrieval at this time.
Coincident with the onset of language comprehension, infants
begin to use the gestural mode to communicate. The first ges-
tures used in intentional communication at about 9 months ex-
press requests (proto-imperatives) and showing and giving
(proto-declaratives) followed by pointing at about 11 months
(Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1979,; Bates,
Camaioni, & Volterra, 1975). More recent developmental stud-
ies of symbolic gesturing (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1988; Good-
wyn & Acredolo, 1993) revealed that infants' use of gesturing
to communication expands rapidly in the 2nd postnatal year, at
which time they produce many gesture—referent pairs that are
used symbolically to denote objects, requests, attributes, replies,
and events. However, such gestures are used as transitional forms
and replaced by appropriate verbal labels as soon as they can
be articulated, perhaps serving, as H. Werner and Kaplan (1963)
suggest, to ease the infant from sensorimotor to representational
functioning. Consistent with this progression from gesture to
word, it is our contention that infants first reveal the emergence
of their cognitive self by using the gestural mode (i.e., mark-
directed behavior to their mirror image) and that only later is
this self-recognition expressed in spoken language.
Infants' comprehension of self-referent pronouns and their
use of the gestural mode to communicate is accompanied by
the appearance of another marker of the developing sense of
self: first-person pointing. It is noteworthy that although third-
person pointing (you) is evident at 9-11 months, first-person
pointing (/ or me) is not seen before about 18 months (Bates
et al., 1987; Pettito, 1993). Bates et al. (1987) suggest that this
discontinuity between first- and third-person pointing reflects
an underlying uncertainty in the emerging understanding of the
self. Specifically, if third-person pointing indicates that the infant
has made a distinction between self and object (/) as H. Werner
and Kaplan (1963) have argued, then the delay in first-person
pointing might reflect the fact that the cognitively more complex
concept of self as object (me) is not in place. Therefore, it seems
reasonable to conclude that the coincident advances witnessed in
the gestural achievements of self-pointing and self-recognition
and in infants' beginning comprehension of self-referent pro-
nouns, all of which emerge when infants are about 18 months
old, signal that at some level the infants' sense of self is being
consolidated in this time frame. In any event, the marked discon-
tinuity (at the level of performance) in the onset of first- and
third-person referential pointing may well reflect the infants'
uncertainty about the nature of the self and the changing per-
spective needed to sort out / and you, which are only expressed
some months later in productive language.
Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues (Goldin-Meadow, Ali-
bali, & Church, 1993; Morford & Goldin-Meadow, 1992) attach
particular developmental significance to the discovery of dis-
crepancies between gesture and speech, regarding them as
"windows on the mind" of a child in transitional states of
knowledge acquisition. They have shown that in certain prob-
 510 HOWE AND COURAGE
lem-solving and language acquisition domains, gesture-speech
mismatches signal that a child is struggling to consolidate fledg-
ling concepts preparatory to advancing into a new knowledge
state. When a child is in such a transitional state, knowledge
that can he expressed in the gestural mode is still unavailable
for (and thus mismatched with) expression in the speech mode.
These observations concerning gesture-speech mismatches
have potential implications for the development of the concept
of the self and its expression in self-language and in the verbal
recounting of self-experiences (i.e., autobiographical memo-
ries). Specifically, it is only following the emergence of the
cognitive self as expressed through gestures such as mirror self-
recognition and self-pointing that infants are able to consolidate
their burgeoning knowledge about the self and to move on to a
new level of competence that enables them to use self-language
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and narrative skills to report autobiographical memories in
speech.
In sum, we propose that infants first reveal their awareness
of the cognitive sense of self nonverbally. Beginning at about
18 months, they are able to use the gestural mode (i.e., mark-
directed behavior to their mirror image; self-referent pointing)
to communicate an early awareness of the self that is the corner-
stone of autobiographical memory. Also in this time frame (and
consistent with other developmental phenomena in which com-
prehension precedes production; see Bates et al., 1987; Goldin-
Meadow et al., 1993), infants begin to understand self-referent
pronouns that only later, between about 22 and 24 months, can
be expressed in productive language about the self. This evi-
dence suggests strongly that during the latter half of the 2nd
postnatal year of life, infants are consolidating the cognitive,
linguistic, and (as noted earlier in The Emergence of the Cogni-
tive Self, Not Language, Portends Autobiographical Memory)
affective components of their sense of self as object of experi-
ence (me). However, it is also clear that there is a marked
discontinuity (in terms of performance) in the translation of
this awareness from gestural to verbal expressions, a discrep-
ancy that portends a readiness to move on to a more advanced
level of self-awareness that includes the ability to describe the
experiences of the self autobiographically.
The Accumulation of Autobiographical Memories
Across Childhood
We now turn to our explanation for the often observed in-
crease in childhood memories that occurs after the onset of the
self. Specifically, although the onset of the cognitive self can
explain the origin of autobiographical memory, setting the lower
limit for such memories at around 2 years of age, the question
remains, why is it that adult memories of childhood become
more numerous across the early years in childhood? 1b antici-
pate the outcome of this section, the evidence we review shows
that throughout childhood, the ability to maintain information
in storage increases, not only in autobiographical memory, but
in all of memory (Howe & O'Sullivan, in press).
We have already reviewed considerable evidence illustrating
that even young toddlers can retain information over protracted
periods of time and evidence that there exist clear age improve-
ments in children's long-term retention performance. Although
some of the key factors that contribute to memory development
(e.g., changes in strategies, knowledge) are known, it is not
clear from a basic-process perspective why such improvements
occur. That is, although a number of variables have been identi-
fied as important in memory development (for a review, see
Schneider & Pressley, 1989), these variables, by necessity, exert
their effects al the level of basic processes (i.e., storage and
retrieval). Although we know that these factors, for example
strategic rehearsal, can lead to better recall, it is not clear
whether these effects arise because the stability of traces in
storage increases, the ease of retrieving these traces increases,
or both. It is only when we discover what basic process (or
processes) mediates these improvements in retention that we
gain a clearer understanding of the nature of memory develop-
ment in general, and autobiographical memory in particular.
Integrating the Self Into Models of Memory: A
Dynamic View of Memory and Retention
A number of researchers investigating the role of the self in
memory have concluded that the self, inasmuch as it is an orga-
nized knowledge structure, can be used to mediate memories
(for an overview, see Greenwald & Banaji, 1989). Like any
other knowledge structure (e.g., see Bjorklund, 1987), the self
can be used to interpret and organize incoming information.
Indeed, Klein and Kihlstrom (1986) proposed a single-factor
theory of organization and memory, one that accounted for both
self and semantic encoding effects. This view that the self be-
haves like any other organizational scheme in memory is consis-
tent with our position that autobiographical memory is function-
ally no different than any other type of memory. If this is true,
then surely autobiographical memory must be accommodated
by current, mainstream models of memory.
In this section, we illustrate how this can be accomplished
using a recently developed model of how memories are initially
acquired and how they are maintained over long-term retention
intervals. Before articulating the details of this trace-integrity
framework it is important to note that the model is dynamic
inasmuch as (a) mathematically, the state of the memory trace
at time MS a simple function of the current conditions plus the
state of the trace at time r — 1 (for an exegesis of the Markovian
assumptions associated with this model, see Brainerd, Howe, &
Desrochers, 1982; Brainerd, Howe, & Kingma, 1982; Howe &
O'Sullivan, in press, and for a general description of dynamic
models, including Markovian assumptions, see Bogartz, 1994;
Howe & Rabinowitz, 1994); (b) the individual trace evolves
as a consequence of the interaction between the nominal envi-
ronmental stimuli or events and information already stored in
memory (see Howe & Brainerd, 1989); (c) the slorage medium
itself is volatile, with trace reorganization and alteration oc-
curring on a regular basis (also see Tulving, 1984; for similar
arguments in the area of autobiographical memory, see Rob-
inson, 1996); and (d) storage and retrieval processes, although
clearly different, interact not just in the sense that encoding and
retrieval contexts need to overlap for successful recollection,
but so too do receding and retrieval contexts (see Estes, 1988;
Tulving, 1984). Also, the advantages of this approach include
its consistency with the assumptions of any number of other
 EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
formal models of memory (for a review, see Howe & O'Sulli-
van, in press). Moreover, the model applies to the acquisition
and retention data generated from any number of long-term
memory paradigms (e.g., free and cued recall, paired-associates
recall) across different type of materials (e.g., picture-word
lists, categorized lists, event sequences, stories) and ages (from
infancy to late adulthood; see Howe & O'Sullivan, in press).
Theoretically, the trace-integrity framework turns on a simple
idea, namely, the disintegration-redintegration hypothesis.
Here, as in any number of other theories, memory traces consist
of primitive elements (e.g., features, nodes) that are bound to-
gether (integrated) to form cohesive structures (also see review
in Estes, 1988). Trace formation at acquisition is driven by
integration tendencies in which storage and retrieval simply rep-
resent different aspects of the continuum of integration. That is,
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early in the trace-acquisition process, the central problem is
one of encoding primitive elements and developing a stable
representation of the to-be-remembered item or event in storage.
Once a stable representation has formed, later acquisition pro-
cesses are concerned with the establishment of a reliable re-
trieval route, one that produces the item on demand. That storage
and retrieval are viewed as constituents of a single underlying
(trace integrity) memory continuum is consistent with other
contemporary theories (e.g., Chechile, 1987; Metcalfe, 1990),
particularly those of the encoding specificity variety (e.g., Ack-
erman, 1987; Tulving, 1984).
The critical factor determining memorability, then, is the de-
gree to which the "glue" that provides cohesion among the
trace elements is intact. During initial learning, this cohesion
increases to a point at which an item can be recalled with some
nominal probability greater than zero (an index that, at the very
least, sufficient features have been encoded that a trace has been
established in storage) followed by a point at which an item
can be recalled withp = 1.00 (an index of trace retrievability
or item accessibility). During any retention interval, trace integ-
rity can (a) remain at asymptote (no change in storage or re-
trieval), (b) dissipate such that the recall probability remains
above 0 but is less than 1 (a change associated primarily with
failures of the accessibility or retrieval type), or (c) disintegrate
to a level where the probability of recall is zero (a change
associated primarily with failures of the availability or storage
type). Changes of the disintegrative variety can arise from any
number of processes that lead to the dissolution of bonds uniting
primitive trace elements (e.g., trace decay, interference, cross-
talk among items). It is important to note that, unlike some
theories in which storage failures are identified with trace era-
sure or trace absence, such failures in the present framework,
although producing zero recall, do not carry this extreme impli-
cation. Rather, items that have crossed the zero recall threshold
have not necessarily vanished from memory, but rather, may
simply be indistinguishable from the background noise of other
memory elements. This raises the interesting possibility that
such traces may become refurbished during retention tests, a
possibility that is discussed shortly.
Regardless of the level of disintegration that occurred across
the retention interval, changes in a trace's status can occur sim-
ply as a function of retention tests. These changes are referred
to as reminiscence. Reminiscence is treated as the refurbishment
511
of traces through die mechanism of redintegration (e.g., Horo-
witz & Prytulak, 1969; Howe & Brainerd, 1989; Howe, Cour-
age, & Bryant-Brown, 1993). That is, traces can be (re)con-
structed simply as a function of being tested, often because of
the cues (both internal and external) that are generated in the
testing situation. Because examples of retrieval related reminis-
cence are relatively well-known in the literature (e.g., see
Payne's, 1987, review of hypermnesia), we do not reiterate
them here. However, because storage related reminiscence pro-
cesses are less well-known (but see Brainerd, Reyna, Howe, &
Kingma, 1990; Chechile, 1987; Howe & O'Sullivan, in press),
we provide a somewhat detailed illustration of them, at least as
expressed in this and related models. We do this in part because
it illustrates the dynamic link between storage and retrieval
processes in this model. As well, our discussion illustrates how
reconstruction involves changes at the level of storage, a phe-
nomenon that has taken on considerable importance in recent
models of autobiographical recall of true and false memories
(e.g., Conway, Collins, Gathercole, & Anderson, 19%).
Recall that simply because a trace has a recall probability of
zero at the beginning of a retention test does not mean that that
item has vanished from memory. Rather, because it can also
mean that the trace is simply indistinguishable from other traces
in the background, it is possible that there still exists some level,
albeit low, of trace integrity. Redintegration of some of these
primitive elements and their bonds during test opportunities can
lead to increased integration and recovery of information in
storage. Again, although the idea of altering information at the
level of storage may seem novel, it has been around for some
time (e.g., see Howe & Brainerd, 1989, for a review, and Pia-
get & Inhelder's, 1973, discussion of reconstructive memory).
For example, historically, the idea that changes in memory, in
particular storage failures, were not equated with trace erasure
but rather a progressive modification, can be traced back to
Gestalt psychology. Here, memory architectures consisted of
fluid structures that were subject to change while resident in
storage. In particular, Kohler (1929, 1941) argued that with
time, traces would undergo spontaneous reorganization in accor-
dance with laws similar to those governing perception (particu-
larly the law of similarity, a notion more recently echoed by
Tulving, 1984, among others). For example, traces become dis-
torted over time because they interact with other similar traces,
the consequence of which is that traces metamorphose in the
direction of "good gestalts" (simple, well-integrated represen-
tations) that are easier to preserve in memory but that now lack
the episodic information that was originally encoded.
More recently, changes in the architecture of traces at the
level of storage have figured prominently in long-term memory
models including search of associative memory (SAM; Men-
sink & Raaijmakers, 1988), theory of distributed associative
memory (TODAM; Murdock, 1982), parallel distributed pro-
cessing (POP) models (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1985), and
neural models (e.g., Greenough & Bailey, 1988). Indeed, in-
creasing numbers of memory theorists have adopted the view
that "storage and retrieval may be distinguished conceptually
but must be closely related in practice, for the way information
is coded is a major determinant of its retrievability under possi-
ble test conditions" (Estes, 1988, p. 360). Not only is the way
 512 HOWE AND COURAGE
information is stored important but so too is what happens to
it in storage across the retention interval. For example, Tulving
(1984), like us and others (see Estes, 1988), defines the product
of encoding or engram (the memory trace) as consisting of
bundles of features (the exact nature of which is not critical to
any of the assumptions discussed here). More important, Tulv-
ing (1984) notes that
One of the distinctive characteristics of engrams of events is their
mutability: Functional properties of engrams change over time. Re-
cuding is the generic name of related operations and processes that
take place after the encoding of the original event and thereby bring
about changes in the engram . . . . The receding of an original
engram . . . is governed by the similarity of interpolated events to
the original event, similarity of encoding operations performed on
interpolated events, or both. (p. 230)
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Similar ideas lie at the heart of any number of other theories of
memory, including recoding during retrieval (Allen, Mahler, &
Estes, 1969), trace dispersion (Shepard, 1961; Shepard &
Chang, 1963), trace incrementing (Raaijmakers & Shiffrin,
1981), convolution (e.g., Murdock, 1982), memory blending
(McClelland & Rumelhart, 1985; Metcalfe, 1990), as well as
neural models (e.g., Greenough & Bailey, 1988). Indeed, in
Chechile's (1987) model, feature bundles (memory traces) are
held together with different strengths. Feature losses occur when
bonds are destroyed, with trace recallability being a function of
the most weakly bound feature in the critical set of features
comprising the trace.
Our model is certainly consistent with these propositions
about trace features, bonds, mutability in storage, and the close
connectedness of storage and retrieval. It is also consistent with
most developmental speculations concerning memory, especially
those of the encoding specificity persuasion (e.g., Ackerman,
1987) as well as with findings on age changes in children's
reconstructive memory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 1990; Inhelder,
1969; Liben, 1977; Piaget, 1968; Piaget & Inhelder, 1973). For
example, Piaget and Inhelder (1973) reported improved mem-
ory over a 6- to 12-month interval for a seriated array. These
improvements could not be accounted for by simple reminis-
cence effects. Rather, they were attributed to reconstruction of
stored information based on better articulated cognitive schemes
that served to reorganize memories. Note that this account is
similar to the gestalt argument that "autonomous 'forces' acting
upon memory slowly transform their contents into a form more
closely resembling a good gestalt—a simple, well-organized,
and stable structure" (Bower & Hilgard, 1981, p. 316). It is
also consistent with Paris and Lindauer's (1977) observation
that,
An adequate model of memory must not assume that the input to
a memory store is retrieved intact. . . . Memory is not a repository
for experiences that are encoded and recalled one time; rather, mean-
ingful material is subject to continuous reorganization in memory,
(p. 52)
Clearly, the idea that stored information is modifiable to a
point of partial dissolution, blending or becoming restructured
with other information, or being overwritten is not unique to
us. Equally obvious is that the idea that such altered information
can be fleshed out again is not new either, having appeared in
other theories in such forms as redintegration (Horowitz &
Prytulak, 1969) or reactivation (e.g., Rovee-Collier & Shyi,
1992). In addition, there is evidence indicating that there can
be changes in stored traces simply as a function of test trials
(e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 1996; McDaniel & Masson, 1985;
Richardson, 1985). As we have pointed out previously (e.g.,
Howe & Brainerd, 1989), because our model acknowledges
that storage is a dynamic, not static, medium and that storage
failures are not equated with trace absence, reconstruction of
traces in storage is a real, albeit somewhat empirically infrequent
possibility.
1b summarize, in the trace-integrity framework, storage and
retrieval are regarded as processes constituting a single memory
continuum in which traces consist of collections of primitive
elements. Traces that are integrated during the learning phase
can experience disintegration across the long-term retention in-
terval, a process that, like acquisition, has both a storage and a
retrieval component. Similarly, during the long-term retention
test itself, traces can be redintegrated simply as a consequence
of the testing situation, a process of trace recovery that can
involve both storage and retrieval. This conceptualization of
storage and retrieval has gained broad acceptance in the memory
development literature, is consistent with other conceptualiza-
tions of these processes in other models, and is an example
of one of three classic positions of forgetting (e.g., Crosland,
1921).
Yes, But What Does This Have to Do With
Autobiographical Memory ?
What the trace-integrity framework does is (a) sets a general
context, one that is common to long-term memory in general,
in which to situate autobiographical memory, and (b) explains
the accumulation of autobiographical memories using a simple,
basic process mechanism, namely, storage maintenance. By us-
ing the same mechanisms to explain autobiographical memory
as those used to explain other memories and their development,
we simplify and enhance our understanding of memory develop-
ment at both a very specific as well as a global level.
Situating autobiographical memory. In order to situate au-
tobiographical memory, consider how a system such as the one
described in the preceding section might encode an event both
before and after the emergence of the cognitive self. When fea-
tures are sampled from the current encoding array (e.g., word
list, ongoing event) or nominal stimulus and stored in long-term
memory, additional interpretive or internal contextual features
may be added. It is well-known that at encoding, only a subset
of features that characterize an event are actually encoded, de-
pending on a number of factors (e.g., a feature's salience, the
encoder's expectation, attentional factors), with the number of
features being encoded varying in a probabilistic fashion. Thus,
reminiscent of stimulus sampling theory (e.g., see Hilgard &
Bower, 1975; Neimark & Estes, 1967), a functional stimulus
(the stored trace of encoded features) is extracted, one con-
sisting of a subset of features, from the nominal situation.
Clearly, until the self becomes a viable cognitive entity, one
with recognizable features, the encoding of such features into
 EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
the functional trace is impossible. However, once the self be-
comes viable, its features gain the potential to be sampled,
although as we have seen with other features in the nominal
situation, by no means does this guarantee that they are sampled.
Whether self features are sampled is a probabilistic process,
one that would be contingent on the same factors as any other
feature (e.g.. salience, attention, the extent or centrality of par-
ticipation by the self in the event). Such encoding variability
(also see Flexser & Tulving, 1978) may explain fluctuations in
the numbers of early memories related to the self as there may
be a rather restricted set of features from which to sample in
the first place. As more features are added to the "urn," the
greater the likelihood that at least some self features are sampled
and encoded in the functional trace for an event. Thus, although
there is no chance of encoding self features prior to the emer-
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gence of a viable cognitive self, this does not mean that events
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cannot be remembered as events, as attested to by the ever-
growing literature in this field (Bauer, 1995). Similarly, even
when a viable cognitive self emerges, events may still remain
events if features of the self are not sampled and encoded in
the stored trace. The effects of this sampling variability might
be particularly noticeable early in the establishment of the self
as the number of features defining the self may be relatively
restricted. As the number of features associated with the self
increases, the likelihood of at least some of these features being
sampled increases, changing memory for an event into memory
for an event that happened to me: A memory that is now, by
definition, autobiographical. Thus, as we have stated throughout,
simply having a viable cognitive self sets the bottom limit as to
when autobiographical memories can be established; however,
it does not mean that such memories need be established at that
age. Indeed, if there are few features associated with the self,
then the likelihood is low that those features are incorporated
into the memory trace for an event. As that feature set grows,
so too does the probability that self features are incorporated
into the memory trace, making that event memory autobiograph-
ical. This, in addition to the growth in storage capacity over
longer and longer intervals, can account for the accumulation of
autobiographical memories as we age in childhood, accounting
for the sorts of growth or increased frequencies of childhood
memories with age (e.g., Wetzler & Sweeney, 1986). In fact,
with the increase in features (knowledge) concerning the self,
memories related to the self may be more efficiently organized
in storage, contributing to their increased longevity.
This proposal is consistent with suggestions by others that
growth in knowledge structures promotes more efficient organi-
zation of information in storage, which in turn promotes long-
term retention of that information (e.g., Bjorklund, 1987). In-
deed, as already noted, this is a dynamic process and storage
medium such that new autobiographical memories add features
to the self, which in turn influence subsequent encoding of auto-
biographical events and can oftentimes promote the reorganiza-
tion (or receding) of self information in storage. Such effects
are anticipated in any number of theories of autobiographical
memory (e.g., Conway, 1996; Robinson, 1996). For example,
Robinson (1996) emphasizes the importance of transformations
of subsequent experiences on information already in memory,
particularly with reference to changes in the person. Conway
MEMORY 513
(1996) alerts us to the importance of self transitions in landmark
memories in one's autobiography. That is, as the self goes
through various transitions, events associated with these transi-
tion points are well remembered (e.g., Csikszentmihalkyi &
Beattie, 1979). Although such findings highlight the importance
of changes in the self in autobiographical memories, it is equally
likely that such transitions represent unique occurrences in one's
life. As distinctive and unique experiences tend to be more mem-
orable in general (e.g., Hunt & McDaniel, 1993), it would
not be surprising to obtain similar effects in autobiographical
memory. Indeed, Linton (1979) has obtained such findings in
her studies of autobiographical memory, and Brewer (1988)
found uniqueness of an event to be the best overall predictor of
autobiographical recall.
In any event, the point is quite simple. Autobiographical mem-
ories can be accounted for using the same principles as those
found in contemporary models in the mainstream literatures on
memory and memory development. This is consistent with other
research on the self as a system of knowledge that organizes
memories like any other knowledge structure (e.g., Green-
wald & Banaji, 1989; Klein & Kihlstrom, 1986) as well as
other models of autobiographical memory (e.g., Conway, 1996;
Robinson, 1996). Indeed, unless additional data become avail-
able that indicate the need for a distinct memory system, one
with different memory processes, it is considerably more parsi-
monious to view the establishment and subsequent development
of autobiographical memory in the manner outlined here.
Accumulating autobiographical memories. Howe and
O'Sullivan (in press), in a review of a number of studies in
which this model had been used, showed that storage processes
tended to dominate forgetting during childhood and that these
storage failure rates declined with age. That is, regardless of
whether recall was free or cued, or whether the materials were
pictures, words, categorized, or uncategorized, storage failures
swamped retrieval failures. Interestingly, not only were storage
failure rates greater than retrieval failure rates for all compari-
sons, but average storage failure rates were almost three times
greater than average retrieval failure rates. Developmentally, the
data showed that storage failure rates tended to decline with
age, whereas no changes were observed in retrieval failure rates.
Thus, there were two prominent trends identified, namely, that
(a) regardless of age, storage failures were more prominent
than retrieval failures and (b) what develops in children's long-
term retention is the ability to maintain memory traces in storage
across the retention interval. That such consistency was obtained
across a wide variety of studies provides relatively convincing
and converging evidence that forgetting in childhood is due to
alterations of information at the level of storage not simply
failures to retrieve information that remains intact in long-term
memory.
What is the specific implication of these findings for the early
development of autobiographical memory? Clearly, even though
very young children can recall events that took place many
months ago or even a year or more ago (for a review, see
Howe & Courage, 1993; Hudson, 1993), the results of Howe
and O'Sullivan's (in press) analysis indicates that the informa-
tion loss that does occur for these children is very likely to
result from storage, not retrieval, failures. Because younger chil-
 514 HOWE AND COURAGE
dren are more susceptible to storage failure than older children,
it would seem that earlier childhood memories are less intact
than later childhood memories, thus providing a basic-process
explanation of why more memories are available to adults from
later than earlier childhood. Quite simply, from a basic-process
perspective at least, what this literally means is that less informa-
tion is available in memory from our earlier experiences than
from our later experiences. As our trace-maintenance skills de-
velop, so too does the numerosity of our memories over more
and more protracted retention intervals. Clearly, then, failures
to recall early life experiences are not simply a matter of finding
the right retrieval cue, but rather, a failure in the availability of
that information in storage.
A question arises concerning the generalizability of these
findings from the episodic memory tasks reviewed by Howe and
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O'Sullivan (in press) to autobiographical memories discussed
in this article. Although this clearly is an empirical question,
there is considerable evidence that memory behaves much the
same way in situ as in the laboratory (e.g., Brainerd & Ornstein.
1991). As an example, consider children's memory for trau-
matic events. As we have noted elsewhere, studies of children's
memories for traumatic events reveal that such memories are
similar to those for nontraumatic events. Indeed, there is an
emerging consensus that traumatic memories differ only from
nontraumatic ones inasmuch as the trauma itself makes that
event unique and distinctive against the background of other
events in one's life (Howe et al., 1994b). Thus, although trauma
may serve to enhance event memory through uniqueness (but
see the literature on "flashbulb" memories; e.g., Winograd &
Neisser, 1992), traumatic memories appear to behave very much
like nontraumatic memories.
Our basic-process perspective that subsequent gains in mem-
ory in general, and autobiographical memory in particular,
comes from additional developments in children's ability to re-
tain information in storage is consistent with other theories of
memory development as well as our more global perspective
that, given our current state of knowledge (see Footnote 1),
changes in memory with age are primarily of the software, not
hardware, variety. That is, better storage maintenance may derive
from advances (both quantitative and qualitative) in strategy
use (e.g., Bjorklund, 1990), knowledge base (e.g., Bjorklund,
1987), or extraction of gist (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 1993).
Regardless of which approach (or approaches) is preferred, the
data clearly indicate that developmental improvements in long-
term retention are confined primarily to changes at the level of
information storage.
Conclusions, Predictions, and Caveats
In this article, we have argued that the emergence and subse-
quent development of autobiographical memory are controlled
by the discovery of the cognitive self and increases in the ability
to maintain information in memory storage, respectively. We
have provided what we believe is convincing evidence that the
underlying structures and processes that drive memory develop-
ment operate in a continuous fashion from birth onward; that
is, there is no need to posit separately developing memory sys-
tems or additional hardware advances to account for the sudden
offset of infantile amnesia. Rather, like the development of other
knowledge structures in memory, infants acquire a cognitive
sense of self, one around which event memories can be personal-
ized and preserved as autobiographical. And, like other struc-
tures, categories, and concepts in memory, the cognitive sense
of self emerges and is represented nonverbally, only later being
expressed, not determined, using language. Thus, the offset of
infantile amnesia and the onset of autobiographical memory
does not require the appearance of a separate memory system
nor must it await developments in language, autonoetic aware-
ness, or metacognition that occur late in the preschool years
(e.g., K. Nelson, 1993; Perner & Ruffman, 1995). Rather, ac-
cording to our theory, it is the natural consequence of young
toddlers' more general tendency to develop nonverbal represen-
tational structures that describe the world around them (e.g.,
Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Mandler, 1992).
Similarly, the subsequent ability to retain more autobiographi-
cal information with age in childhood develops not as a function
of advances in narrative skills, but rather as a natural conse-
quence of global improvements in children's general memory
abilities, namely, the capacity to maintain information in storage
over longer and longer intervals. Although a number of skills
may be involved in, or at least correlated with, this improve-
ment, including developments in language, strategies, knowl-
edge, and gist extraction, the one common denominator to
changes in children's retention over time is the basic ability of
keeping information intact in storage.
Some Methodological Issues
As with any theory, our speculations raise as many questions
as they answer. For example, there remains the intractable prob-
lem of determining exactly what infants and toddlers remember
about events, an issue that is as much one of methodology as it
is of discerning the nature of representation. At the heart of the
problem is the requirement that unambiguous evidence for the
(autobiographic) recall of events can only be provided through
verbal report: a requirement that, by definition, excludes the
period of infancy (see Pillemer & White, 1989). However, as
we know that infants are well able to recall events months before
they have productive language (e.g., Bauer & Mandler, 1992;
Meltzoff, 1988c), it defies logic to conclude that because the
traditional output device (language) is unavailable, so too is the
memory. Because we cannot ask preverbal infants if they are
accessing a specific past experience when we test for retention,
we must look to infants' behavior for evidence of recall.
This leaves the thorny issue of establishing a set of necessary
and sufficient conditions for determining whether a nonverbal
behavior is indicative of recall of a specific past event. As noted
earlier, Meltzoff (1990) has argued that evidence of deferred
imitation is an appropriate index of the recall of action se-
quences. Specifically, as the to-be-recalled information is ac-
quired following only brief exposure, without opportunity to
practice, and is recalled after a significant delay (thus ruling
out explanations based on procedural or sensorimotor learning),
such deferred imitation reflects the operation of at worst a
"nonverbal episodic-like" and at best a declarative memory
system. Using similar arguments, Bauer et al. (1994, 1995) as
 EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
well as Mandler (1990b) contend that the elicited imitation task
in which infants replicate temporally ordered action sequences
following a delay can be considered a nonverbal analogue of
cued verbal recall. As the action sequences are not perceptually
present at retention, their temporal order must have been en-
coded at initial learning and retrieved from a representation of
the event. More recently, McDonough, Mandler, McKee, and
Squire (1995) examined deferred imitation in patients with am-
nesia with damage to the hippocampal formation, and who
showed impairments to long-term (declarative) memory on
standard tests. These patients performed poorly on tests of de-
ferred imitation, ones analogous to those used by Meltzoff
(1995), compared to normal control adults as well as those
with damage restricted to the frontal lobes. McDonough et al.
suggest that deferred imitation is dependent on brain structures
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essential for declarative memory and that infants who show
deferred imitation have an early capacity for declarative mem-
ory. In light of this research, there is a growing consensus that
deferred imitation tasks meet the criteria for what is referred to
as declarative memory except, of course, the ability to verbalize
what is being recalled. If such findings hold, deferred imitation
may constitute a nonverbal analogue of traditional declarative
memory tasks. Given that the behavioral evidence provided in
these imitation paradigms is indicative of the declarative recall
of events, we are still left with the question of whether these
nonverbal representations are organized autobiographically. We
contend that until the development of the cognitive self in the
2nd year, such organization is logically very unlikely.
It should also be pointed out that simply having verbal con-
firmation that someone is recalling a specific life episode does
not make it so. For example, it is well known that narrative
truth (i.e., one's narrative construction of an autobiographical
event) is not necessarily veridical, either in time or in fact, with
the historical truth (i.e., what actually happened; e.g., D. P.
Spence, 1982). Moreover, there is evidence that the verbal re-
counting of autobiographical events is subject to other forms of
distortion, ones that are consistent with the recaller's current
beliefs and expectations as well as the expectations of the lis-
tener (Barclay, 1988;Wagenaar, 1988,1990). Even those memo-
ries that are thought to be stressful, like those contained in so-
called flashbulb memories, are subject to distortions and inaccu-
racies (Weaver, 1993; Winograd & Neisser, 1992). Thus, even
verbal indices of memory may not provide reliable measures of
memories for one's life events. The interesting implication of
this observation is that if conversations about our life events are
said to reactivate and maintain autobiographical information in
memory over time (e.g., K. Nelson, 1993), but such narrative
recall is often tainted by distortions, then would not such conver-
sations distort the original memory it was intended to reify?
Individual Differences and Some Predictions
Clearly, a number of issues remain to be clarified, both defini-
tionally and empirically. Despite this, however, we believe sig-
nificant progress has been made in linking major developments
early in life to the personalization of event memory. Indeed, a
number of predictions fall out of our theorizing, ones that capi-
talize on individual differences in the early emergence of the
MEMORY 515
cognitive self. For example, there is considerable variability
across individuals in the age of their first autobiographical mem-
ories when, as adults, they are asked to recall their earliest
experiences (e.g., Usher & Neisser, 1993). One explanation, in
addition to the obvious possibility that there exist individual
differences in forgetting rates, is that these differences in recall-
ing early experiences are related to corresponding individual
variation in the development of storage maintenance. Moreover,
they may be linked to variation in (a) the age of onset of
the cognitive self (although age variation here is certainly less
substantial than the age variation for adult recall of early memo-
ries) or (b) the propensity to encode self-relevant features into
memory traces for early events. Although we have discussed
the second variation earlier, it is interesting to note with respect
to variation in age of onset that developmental trends in early
self-recognition during the 2nd year of life show substantial
individual differences in the age of onset of mark-directed be-
havior (Berenthal & Fischer, 1978; Lewis & Brooks-Gunn,
1979; Lewis, Brooks-Gunn, & Jaskir, 1985; Schneider-Rosen &
Cicchetti, 1984, 1991). These studies showed that whereas
about 25% of 15- to 18-month-old infants showed mark-directed
behavior to the red spot on their noses, others did not show
self-recognition until the end of the 2nd year, at which time
about 75% showed mark-directed behavior.
Although these individual differences in the age of onset of
visual self-recognition have not been fully explored, there is
evidence that they originate primarily in maturational rather
than social or experiential factors. Specifically, according to
Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979), neither the child's sex nor a
variety of general measures of social experience such as moth-
er's education, family socioeconomic status, birth order, or num-
ber of siblings were related to onset of self-recognition. Further-
more, maltreated infants, whose aberrant caretaking environ-
ments result in well-documented delays or deviations in their
emotional development as it relates to the self (Cicchetti &
Beeghly, 1987; Cicchetti & Carlson, 1989; Kaufman & Cic-
chetti, 1989; Schneider-Rosen & Cicchetti, 1984), are not de-
layed in the onset of mirror self-recognition (Schneider-Rosen &
Cicchetti, 1991). In contrast, infants who have delayed matura-
tion (e.g., Down syndrome, familial mental retardation, autism)
do show delays in visual self-recognition (Cicchetti, 1991;
Hill & Tomlin, 1981; Loveland, 1987, 1993; Mans, Cicchetti, &
Sroufe, 1978; Schneider-Rosen & Cicchetti, 1991; Spiker &
Ricks, 1984). However, these infants can succeed at the self-
recognition task if and when they reach a mental age comparable
to that of nondelayed infants who succeed at the task, an obser-
vation that perhaps reflects an important cognitive component
of this underlying maturation. Consistent with this, Brooks-
Gunn and Lewis (1984) found that recovery to a novel stimulus
following habituation (itself an index of cognitive performance)
was related to onset of self-recognition, with the infant's ability
to notice subtle stimulus change suggested as the causal link.
In any event, the near-universal appearance of mark-directed
behavior among infants who have attained the maturational pre-
requisites suggests that visual self-recognition may be so "ca-
nalized" that its emergence is not conspicuously influenced by
variations in social or child-care experiences (but see Lewis,
Brooks-Gunn, & Jaskir, 1985, for some evidence to the con-
 516 HOWE AND COURAGE
trary). Indeed, Kagan (1981) has argued that the origins of the
self-concept are seen in the maturation of the child and that the
social environment plays only a minor role in this development.
Consistent with this evidence, then, individual differences in the
onset of early autobiographical memories should be related to
maturational, not social or experiential, factors associated with
the emergence of the cognitive self. This hypothesis stands in
direct contrast to the social-constructivist position (e.g., Tes-
sler & Nelson, 1994) in which the onset of autobiographical
memory is said to be directly related to parental conversational
styles (e.g., narrative and paradigmatic styles).
Moreover, differences in the onset of autobiographical mem-
ory in atypical populations should be directly related to delays
in the establishment of the cognitive self and not chronological
age. Additional variations in the onset of autobiographical mem-
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ory, of course, can be attributed to more global differences in
memory functioning, particularly those controlling variability
in the sampling of self features. It is important to note, however,
that although the weight of evidence favors the idea that the
onset of self-recognition is rooted in maturational processes, it
is not the case that the mirror behavior of children with atypical
cognitive development or those with adverse social environments
is identical to that of normally developing children. In fact,
examination of behaviors coincident with mark-directed behav-
ior reveal differences that may well reflect differences in social
interactional variables. For example, normally developing chil-
dren show a combination of surprise followed by shyness or
embarrassment when they notice the red dot on their noses, but
they are generally positive in their responses to their self-image
(Lewis et al., 1989). Likewise, children with maturational or
cognitive delays (e.g., Down syndrome) are also positive toward
their mirror images (Cicchetti, 1991). On the other hand, chil-
dren who have been maltreated and those with autism show
more neutral and negative behavior in response to their mirror
images (Cicchetti, Beeghly, Carlson, & Toth, 1990). Clearly,
then, although social and experiential factors may not determine
the onset of early autobiographical memory, they may determine
the contents of these early memories. That is, the aspects of the
self that are encoded into autobiographical memories depend
on one's experience.
Overall, then, the self as object is launched at a point in
development when the infant is maturationally ready. Although
the origin of this readiness is unknown, it undoubtedly rests in
part on prerequisite perceptual knowledge fundamental to what
Neisser (1993) has described as the ecological self. Thus, chil-
dren who are autistic or who have been maltreated have no
difficulty perceiving their bodies in general (and their faces in
particular) as me. However, achieving Neisser's interpersonal
self, which (though also rooted in perception) evolves through
reciprocal interaction with others, presents a difficulty for in-
fants whose interpersonal relationships are aberrant. This may
explain their discrepant affective responses to their mirror
images.
Interestingly, the development of self-recognition has also
been studied in atypical populations who, through the dictates
of culture or accident of nature, do not have access to their
reflected mirror images. For example, Priel and De Schonen
(1986) reported no age difference in the onset of self-recogni-
tion between a sample of Bedouin infants who had never seen
their facial image prior to testing with mirrors and a sample of
babies who had prior mirror experience. Clearly, the Bedouins
were able to construct a body image from perceptual and sensory
cues that they could coordinate and map onto the visual stimulus
provided by the mirror. The performance of the Bedouin babies
stands in marked contrast to that of a group of blind children
who, though obviously unable to utilize mirror information,
showed no recognition of self in language or imaginative play
until they were 4-5 years old (Fraiberg, 1977). Thus, vision
may be uniquely suited to synthesize information about the
ecological and interpersonal selves provided by other modalities,
and its absence in the blind child significantly delays this
achievement. Indeed, Neisser (1993) has argued that an aware-
ness of the face and its importance for personal relations under-
lies the evaluative self-consciousness that is at the heart of ma-
ture self-recognition. Consistent with this, Bigelow (1995) dis-
cussed delays in both the interpersonal and ecological selves
experienced by blind infants. We, of course, would predict that
these delays in the onset of the ecological self, in particular,
would be accompanied by delays in the age of onset of autobio-
graphical memory. This remains a question for future research
as, to our knowledge, there are no studies in which delays in
autobiographical memory in blind children have been examined.
The development of mirror self-recognition heralds the begin-
ning of the cognitive sense of self as object (me) that serves,
according to our theory, as a foundation for the organization of
our earliest autobiographical memories. Indeed, the variation in
the age of onset of mirror self-recognition may underlie the
variation in the age of onset of earliest recoverable autobio-
graphical memory that occurs between 2 and 3 years, with a
few isolated instances of memories recovered before the age of
2 years (Usher & Neisser, 1993). It might be expected, then,
that with individual variation in the pace of subsequent develop-
ments in the emergence of the cognitive self, comes correspond-
ing advances in the development of autobiographical memory,
although this has not been demonstrated. Specifically, prior to
the first appearance of me, events that the infant experienced
could not have been encoded with reference to the self: They
were not personally experienced, and there was no autobio-
graphical framework. The way that these ' 'preself'' experiences
are represented is an empirical question—perhaps as condi-
tioned responses, perhaps as fragments of knowledge—we sim-
ply do not know. Clearly, however, they do exist as nonperson-
alized events as shown by the numerous studies documenting
the existence of early event memory (Bauer, 1995).
As the self emerges and continues to evolve, it serves to
organize personally experienced events in memory, just as the
memories themselves may serve to adumbrate our selves. How-
ever, with the continued evolution of the self come changes in
the way in which memories are encoded and maintained in
storage as well as changes in the way memories are retrieved
and restored. Just as maturational differences in the initial onset
of the cognitive self is one factor related to individual variability
in the laying down of the first autobiographical memory, so too
are individual and age differences in the subsequent elaboration
of the self-concept to the type of features incorporated into,
and accumulated with, subsequent autobiographical memories.
 EARLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY
Indeed, it is entirely possible that autobiographical memories,
given they have not undergone substantial (re)constructive pro-
cessing, may contain features associated with earlier stages
(e.g., Neisser, 1993) of one's self. As already noted, Conway
(1996), among others, has alerted us to the importance of life's
transition points in stable autobiographical memories. These
results are consistent with the idea that within-individual age
differences in the types and contents of events encrypted into
autobiographical memory are related to changes in one's sense
of self. However, any link forged between these changes and
the contents of autobiographical memories that go beyond the
purely correlational must await progress in dissevering influ-
ences other than the self from autobiographical memory reports
(e.g., receding, reconstruction at retrieval, narrative skills).
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Summation
In this article, we have tried to provide an overarching theo-
retical framework of early personal memory, one that serves to
integrate it with other major achievements at this age. In particu-
lar, we have developed a theory in which the emergence and
early development of autobiographical memory does not require
the invocation of specialized neural mechanisms or separate
memory systems requiring new processes or fundamental laws
of operation. Rather, our theory is clear that autobiographical
memory arises as a natural consequence of developments in
other, related domains as well as other developments, particu-
larly in the software, that drives memory functioning in general.
First, the onset of autobiographical memory is linked to the
development of a new functional knowledge structure, the cogni-
tive self. Like other categories that emerge in cognitive develop-
ment, the cognitive self can be used to organize memories, in
this case, memories of experiences that happened to me. The
emergence of a functional cognitive self at around the end of
the 2nd year of life sets the lower limit for early autobiographical
memories at about 2 years of age, an estimate that is consistent
with most of the empirical data (see Howe & Courage, 1993).
Although personalized memories are feasible at this point,
whether such memories are laid down is contingent on sampling
and encoding features of the self in functional memory traces.
Whereas the establishment of this cognitive self appears to be
controlled maturationally, the contents of autobiographical
traces are determined by a host of factors and are contingent
on feature sampling probabilities.
Second, the accumulation of personal memories across age
in childhood is a simple consequence of a more general phenom-
enon that occurs in children's memory development, namely, an
improvement in the maintenance of information in long-term
storage (also see Howe & O'Sullivan, in press). Thus, autobio-
graphical memories, like other memories, accumulate because
the processes used to maintain information in storage (e.g.,
strategies, verbal and nonverbal; knowledge; gist extraction) are
better developed and more sophisticated in older than younger
children. Depending on the amount of receding of memories
while they are resident in storage, and the extent of (re)con-
struction at the time of recall, autobiographical recollections
may reflect critical features of the self that were encoded at the
time the traces were laid down. By linking autobiographical
517
memory to other developments and well-known principles in
cognition, we hope that we have moved a step closer toward
developing a more comprehensive and integrated picture of
memory and its development over time.
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Received May 4, 1995
Revision received September 17, 1996
Accepted September 24, 1996 •