Magic Shrinking Machine Essay

Childhood Amnesia: The Magic Shrinking Machine Revisited

The magic shrinking machine experiment was conducted by Simcock and Hayne (2002) in which they showed that 3-year-olds were not able to use newly acquired words to describe the “magic” event 6 or 12 month later. There was no verbal prop during the test. Recently, the original designed was duplicated, a test on 33 and 39 month olds but with controlling for potential online reasoning, props were given at recall. The result showed that children were able to use newly acquired words to describe their preverbal memory. That is, the present study shows that previous non-verbal experiences can be verbalized if provide high level of contextual support, this finding is relevant to the offset of childhood amnesia.

Many developmental psychologists suggest that early life experiences have crucial impact on one’s life (Bowlby, 1951; Rutter, 2002). However, most adult can remember only few,

They taught 27-, 33- and 39-month-olds to operate a Magic Shrinking Machine, which could shrink normal size toy into smaller but identical looking replicas. Simcock and Hayne assessed the language ability of children at the time of encoding and the time testing. In addition to that, Simcock and Hayne (2002) also asked participants to fill out a list of words that are associated with the target event which allows them to evaluate whether children had acquired the necessary vocabulary to describe the event between two delays and to access if children use any new words to verbalize their memories. The follow up study was done 6 (or 12) months later, and not a single incident in which children use newly acquired words to describe the event. Thus, Simcock and Hayne (2002) concluded that children’s verbal report of the event were frozen in time, it reflect their verbal skill at the time of