Crovitz technique: what it is and how it is used in mental health

One of the methods that can be used to assess autobiographical memory, and therefore retrograde amnesia, is the Crovitz technique, based on free word association 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.

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What is the Crovitz technique? What does it consist of?

The Crovitz technique is a psychological test used to assess autobiographical memory, mainly in people with some kind 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 developed by Francis Galton and popularized by Carl Jung.

This simple test consists of presenting the subject of evaluation a series of words. The person will have to recount a personal memory of any moment in your life that I associate with the word stimulus. Although it is difficult to carry out quantitative evaluations of the results, these can be useful to analyze the autobiographical memory in broad strokes.

The number and characteristics of the subject's memories are compared with those of his normative group in order to detect signs of cognitive impairment, or to discard them. In this sense, it is important to take into account that the quality of memory varies depending on the age 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 the quantification of the results, it is known that certain types of words favor the recovery of memories with emotional content or periods specific.

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Crovitz Technique Developments

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 of your own. life that this word reminds you of ”and“ Keep thinking until you remember a particular event associated with word".

On his part, Karis carried out a procedure in which he instructed the subjects to write down any memory that came to mind when reading the word stimulus, specifying that these could be very specific (“like breaking a window on a particular day”) or general (“like washing the windows every Saturday morning”).

Memory as a function of encoding age

In general, people remember well events that have happened recently. The quality of memories declines 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 graphed the recall curve as a function of the coding age we observe a strong 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 helpful in evaluating the presence of retrograde amnesia, which is defined as a great difficulty to remember events that took place before an injury specific brain, such as those that are typical of Korsakoff syndrome and dementias, especially that of Alzheimer's.

Another striking fact is that older people, especially those with signs of cognitive impairment, remember to a greater extent Biographical events that occurred when they were between the ages of 10 and 30, compared to those that occurred in the years later. This period has been called "peak of reminiscence".

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History of the word association method

Francis Galton, considered one of the pioneers of statistics (and a staunch defender of the controversial ideas eugenics), developed at the end of the 19th century a technique of psychological evaluation 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 have 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 from 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 as it can help assess consumer reactions to slogans, brand names, etc.

Bibliographic references:

• Crovitz, H. F. & Schiffman, H. (1974). Frequency of episodic memories as a function of their age. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 4 (5): 517-518.

• Rubin, D. C. (1986). Autobiographical Memory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.