ABSTRACT

This review will provide clinicians and researchers in child mental health a basic knowledge and conceptual understanding relevant to research on memory or interpretations of clinical assessments of memory functioning. The study of memory is carried out by a wide array of academic disciplines, including those of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology, anthropology, and psycholinguistics. For this reason, a basic review of memory must attempt to “translate” across the different disciplines. This article integrates a number of usually independent disciplines, such as attachment research, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical psychiatry, and demonstrates the usefulness

of such a synthetic approach. This review examines the nature of memory, with an emphasis on the neurobiological, developmental, interpersonal, and subjective aspects of this fundamental process of the human mind. More extensive application of this multidisciplinary, “interpersonal neurobiology” view of development, relationships, and mental health can be found in The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience (Siegel, 1999). This perspective enables us to view how the mind develops at the interface of neurophysiological process and interpersonal experience. This article will highlight how memory can be seen as the fundamental way in which the mind develops throughout the life span.