Knowledge and judgments about events that occurred prior to birth: The measurement of the persistence of information

Abstract

Data from five laboratories using five different techniques were reanalyzed to measure subjects' knowledge of events that occurred over the past 70 years. Subjects were about 20 years of age, so the measures included events that extended up to 50 years before birth. The functions relating knowledge about the events to age do not decrease precipitously at birth but gradually drop to above-chance levels. Techniques usually used to study retention within the individual can be used to study the persistence of ideas and fashions within an age cohort in a culture.Psychologists have studied retention extensively using a variety of techniques, including questions about events that occurred outside the laboratory (Rubin & Wenzel, 1996). The purpose ofthis paper is to use such techniques to measure the persistence of cultural or historical information by examining information for events that occurred prior to the birth of the person being tested.In questionnaire studies, younger adults often are asked questions about events that occurred before their birth to demonstrate that younger adults do not do as well as older adults who experienced and therefore have episodic memory for the events. Consider one carefully conducted study by Botwinick and Storandt (1980) in which groups of 20 subjects with the nominal ages of25, 35, 45, 55, 65, and 75 were asked questions about entertainment and current events, which were distributed uniformly across the oldest subjects' lives. The same questions were asked for recall and then as part ofa five-choice recognition test. Botwinick and Storandt's youngest three groups were asked questions about events that occurred over a span ofat least 20 years before they were born. By combining these three groups' data, fairly smooth curves were obtained for both the recall and the recognition questions. As is shown in Figure 1, the younger adults do much better for periods from which they were alive, but have some information about events that occurred before their birth. The recall scores remain well above 0%, and the recognition scores well above a 20% chance level, assuming all distracters were equally plausible to the target item. Botwinick and Storandt's younger participants' knowledge of the events that occurred before their birth is a measure of the history maintained by their culture. Unlike the events that occurred after birth, which could have both direct and indirect experience as sources ofleaming (Larsen, 1988), the I thank Erik Bergman and the editor for their help. Reprints are available from

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