Freshman Memories

When Harvard students think back to freshman year, what are the first memories that come to mind? Sheldon H. White '50, professor of Psychology, has spent most of his professional time in classrooms, laboratories, and libraries, but says he hardly ever remembers academic episodes from freshman year.

"Somehow I just don't talk about these memories," says White. "You don't talk about your education when you talk about your college memories. You're being educated almost in spite of the faculty."

This spring, White and David B. Pillemer, a Wellesley assistant professor visiting Harvard for the year, surveyed 32 Harvard juniors and seniors about their memories of two years earlier, and the initial results show that White's own pattern may be typical. The incidents that become etched in students memories, White reports, are not the ones that seem "important, pertinent to a central issue, or related to survival." Rather, he says, "what fires the flashbulb is emotion."

Thus, when asked to describe the first four memories that come to mind, White and Pillemer's respondents struck the same themes over and over: episodes from romantic relationships, anxiety upon arriving at a new dormitory, the sensation of returning home for Thanksgiving vacation, the travails of settling on rooming groups for the following year.

In short, White says, "an awful lot of the memories have to do with the feeling of finding and losing significant social groups." Adds Pillemer, "A lot of the memories in our study that are on the surface academic--like taking an exam--have to do with, say, telling their parents about it, or what it means interpersonally. One or two of them are the kind of the typical memories concerning achievement--'I failed.' But most of them are about how others will react."

White and Pillemer say they are less concerned with the actual content of the memories their subjects describe than with the way they illuminate the nature of memory itself. "The two basic questions we're asking are: what are the rules by which you lay down memories and how do you file them," White explains.

This summer, the two men plan to prepare a journal article about the project, which grew out of a paper the pair wrote on childhood amnesia in 1979 while Pillemer was a graduate student of White's at the School of Education. Examining Freud's claim that memories of childhood cannot go further back than about age seven, the article discussed two distinct kinds of memory. "Flashbulb memories"--a term coined by White's colleague Roger W. Brown, Lindsley Professor of Psychology--consist of pictures of whatever a person is looking at when he gets intensely excited. Script memories, by contrast, string these pictures into narrative stories.

The 1979 study proposed that after the crucial Freudian years of six to eight, a child suddenly becomes proficient at recording complex script memories. "That analysis led us to become interested in when the flashbulb goes off," White says.

Or, as Pillemer explains, "One way to study amnesia, rather than studying it as an absence of memory, is to ask why do people remember those few things they remember very well. That might be where you were and what you were doing when you first learned about an assassination or it might be when you first walked into your freshmen college dorm. Learning about why these particularly salient memories last over years with very little apparent loss of clarity might suggest more about that transition in general."

The groundwork for White and Pillemer's current research was laid in 1977, when Brown and James Kulik published the paper in which the term "flashbulb memory" was proposed--a study of memories of President Kennedy's assassination Based on that project, Pillemer went on to apply the same methods to conduct similar inquiries into memories of the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan and women's memories of the onset of menstruation.

"What we're really doing is extending that line of research now towards college students," says White, noting that their survey forms and brief follow-up questionnaires have been written so they can compare their results directly with those of the earlier studies.

The two researchers also cite as a crucial influence the work of Cornell's Ulric Neisser, whom White describes as "a cognitive psychologist who denounced his own movement." He explains "Neisser argued that you're never going to understand the way people think just by sitting around in laboratories doing hothouse little experiments. People are not computers--what you've got to do is go out and watch people behaving in everyday settings. I suppose we're working in that spirit."

One consequence of this approach, the psychologists are quick to acknowledge, it that they can not judge the truthfulness of their subjects memories. "We're calling this memory but we weren't there at the time the events occured, so we have no check on the veracity of what we're getting," says Pillemer. "One of the appeals of the laboratory is that you can control what goes in and therefore you can look at what comes out and look at the match between the two."

Their methods represent a tradeoff between "absolute experimental control and the realism and benefits of studying what people really do cognitively," Pillemer says.

Eventually, says White, he hopes to receive funding to conduct a similar investigation on a much larger scale, with children of the watershed age of six or seven as subjects. The current project is useful towards that goal, he explains, "because you can very often work quickly to set up an issue with adults. They can tell you what's going on in their minds, so you can sort of stake out a problem by doing some preliminary work with adults."

But White admits, "It's not always a very good way to work--developing a notion of kids as deviations from adulthood. If anything, adults are deviated kids."