Crovitz Technique: What It Is And How It Is Used In Mental Health
One of the methods that can be used to evaluate autobiographical memory, and therefore retrograde amnesia, is Crovitz technique, based on free association of words used by pioneers of psychology such as Galton and Jung. In this article we will analyze Crovitz’s method and the relationship between age and autobiographical memory.
What is the Crovitz technique? What does it consist of?
The Crovitz technique It is a psychological test used to evaluate autobiographical memory, mainly in people with some type of dementia. It was developed by Herbert F. Crovitz and Harold Schiffman in 1974; The authors relied on the free word association method, which had been created by Francis Galton and popularized by Carl Jung.
This simple test consists of presenting the evaluation subject with a series of words. The person will have to relate a personal memory from any moment in your life that associates with the word stimulus. Although it is difficult to carry out quantitative assessments of the results, they can be useful to analyze autobiographical memory in broad strokes.
The number and characteristics of the subject’s memories are compared with those of his or her normative group in order to detect signs of cognitive impairment, or to rule them out. In this sense, it is important to keep in mind that the quality of memory varies depending on the age at which a memory was encoded concrete; We will talk about this below.
Although many experts defend the consistency of this technique, different studies have warned about the weaknesses of the Crovitz technique. Beyond the difficulties related to quantifying the results, it is known that certain types of words favor the recovery of memories with emotional content or from specific periods.
Developments of the Crovitz technique
Different authors have reconceptualized or perfected the technique created by Crovitz and Schiffman For example, Robinson updated the method by specifying two instructions: “Think of an experience in your own life that this word reminds you of” and “Keep thinking until you remember a particular event associated with the word.”
For his part, Karis carried out a procedure in which he instructed the subjects to write down any memory that came to their mind when reading the word stimulus, specifying that these could be very specific (“like having broken a window one day in particular”) or general (“like washing the windows every Saturday morning”).
Memory as a function of coding age
Generally, people remember events that have recently happened well. The quality of memories decreases very markedly as we go back in the last year of life, more or less; memory for previous events worsens more slowly from this point on.
Consequently, when represented graphically the recall curve as a function of encoding age We observe a sharp drop in the last months of life that finally takes the form of an asymptote. However, certain factors have obvious effects on the normal functioning of autobiographical memory.
Thus, the Crovitz technique and other similar methods may be useful to evaluate the presence of retrograde amnesia which is defined as a great difficulty in remembering events that took place before a specific brain injury, such as those typical of Korsakoff syndrome and dementia, especially Alzheimer’s.
Another striking fact is that older people, especially those who show signs of cognitive decline, remember to a greater extent biographical events that occurred when they were between approximately 10 and 30 years old, compared to those that occurred in later years. This period has been called “peak reminiscence.”
History of the word association method
Francis Galton, considered one of the pioneers of statistics (and a strong defender of controversial eugenic ideas), developed at the end of the 19th century a psychological evaluation technique consisting of presenting words to a subject; The latter then verbalized one or two ideas related to the terms given by the evaluator.
Although Galton did not use word association specifically to assess autobiographical memory, other authors adopted it for this and other purposes. The application made by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung is especially famous as a method of analysis of the unconscious, inspired by Freudian free association (or “fundamental rule”).
Word association has been used by psychologists belonging to very different branches of our science. Thus, in addition to the clinical uses that we have described, this method has received some attention from market researchers since it can help evaluate consumer reactions to slogans, brand names, etc.
