Psych Discussion Response
Course Textbook:

Goldstein, B. E. (2015). Cognitive psychology, connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th. ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Original Question:

What is the earliest event you can remember? How old were you at the time of the event? Describe the level of detail in the early memory and your certainty of the details compared to the same for an event that happened within the past 3 years. What would your course textbook say about likely causes for the differences?

Be sure to cite and reference all outside materials, including the text book. All posts should include at least one outside source. If you use the text book your citation should look like this (Goldstein, 2015) in the body of your post. If you are making a direct quote, you should also include the page number (Goldstein, 2015, p. 20). At the end of your post you should include the following Reference listing: Goldstein, B. E. (2015). Cognitive psychology, connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th. ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Reply to the following response with 200 words minimum. (please make response as if having a conversation, respond directly to some of the statements in below post.)

Memories are a strange topic for me, I often find myself trying to remember events from my childhood but I can’t. I look at pictures and I can’t recall any details other than what is in the picture. I’m not exactly sure why this is; I can tell you I had a fairly miserable childhood. I sometimes just think there wasn’t much to remember. The things that I do remember are when I was about 10 years old, my grandparents had a beach house in New Jersey and they use to take me with them every weekend. We would go fishing on the boat and my grandfather would filet the flounder that he caught on the dock. My job was to get the minnows on the hooks for bait….. I also thought it was so sad that these cute little fish had to be used as bait to catch a bigger fish. We also then head over to the beach, which was across the street from the boat dock, and we had to wear beach tags, essentially you paid to go on the beach. I remember the first year we had beach tags, my grandmother was so angry that we had to now pay to go to the beach that we’d been going to for years for free. Lastly and probably my favorite part was dinner. When I was with my grandparents they let me pick whatever I wanted of the menu, they didn’t make me order a kids meal, I could chose whatever I wanted. My order every single weekend was the filet with grilled shrimp, a side baked potato and a Shirley temple. I always enjoyed my time with them, it was nice being away from my 3 siblings and being the oldest it was extra nice to not have annoying siblings around. Since I do not remember too many things about my childhood because I view them as unhappy, I think state-dependent learning is impacting what I recall. (Goldstein, 2015). I have a mood associated with the memories I have and if they are sad or upsetting, I tend to stifle them. The beach trips are fun times for me, hence why I can remember them more freely.

If I were to compare my past memory with something more recent I can confidently say that I can provide more details. I won’t bore you all with the details but I can recall a recent trip to the NC mountains with our friends. I can tell you what our cabin looked like, smelled like and even what we had for dinner each night. I could give you a detailed timeline that included white water rafting, hiking, relaxing, gem mining and exploring. I can definitely tell you about my raft getting flipped in rapids and me being stuck on a rock in the middle of rushing rapids, looking down and seeing a banana peel….seriously. Again, these memories are tied to emotions that bring up happy feelings. Our memories are closely tied to our emotions and can impact how we recall certain events and memories. (Goldstein, 2015).

Over time we lose pieces of memories, how our minds chose what to remember is very interesting and not typical across the board. Remembering adolescence and memories from young adulthood is common because those are high points for encoding memories. (Goldstein, 2015). This is based around the self-image hypothesis, where we are remembering things that will give us meaning and add value to our lives. (Goldstein, 2015).

I wish I could remember more, I am sure there are memories trapped away somewhere, it’s just a matter of getting them untrapped from my long-term memory.

Goldstein, B. E. (2015). Cognitive psychology, connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th. ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth