Lack of infantile amnesia2/26/2024 ![]() On top of this, research indicates that there are individual differences in how old our earliest memories are, based on factors including your language skills, your understanding of emotion, what kind of family structure you grew up in (for example, nuclear or extended), and how much your parents reminisce about earlier events. Similarly, if you read an example earliest memory from someone else that’s from when they were 1-2 years old, you’ll probably report an earlier age for your first memory than someone who’s read an example earliest memory from someone who says they were 5-6 years old. For example, someone who has recently been reminded about personal or public events in the first few years of their life will tend to recall first memories from earlier in life than those who haven’t been reminded – but we don’t know whether that’s because they really have earlier memories, or if they have dated the memories as being earlier. There are other ways that memory can be modified, which we can see in research on people’s earliest memories. Even if we have remembered an event correctly, there’s no guarantee that we’ve also accurately remembered when it happened. The combination of childhood amnesia and something like a family member reminiscing about an event that happened to us can therefore cause some problems for research on childhood memories – often we can’t be sure whether we really remember something, whether have constructed a memory from something that someone else has said, or whether we have embellished an existing memory with details that aren’t correct. We get better at using retrieval cues (things that spark a memory) and therefore there are more chances to encounter things that remind us of a memory.Īs I’ve written about before, it’s possible to form false memories from other people telling us that an event happened. ![]() We get better at retaining memories once we have them. We get faster at storing information, so memories become richer in detail as they are laid down. Long-term access to memories probably increases across our early childhoods because: It’s not as though we spend the first two years of our lives unable to remember anything – but it does seem likely that we start out not very good at forming memories and gradually improve. The ‘density’ of autobiographical memories gradually increases till we’re around eight or ten and then levels off, so it’s possible that there are actually two stages to childhood amnesia: an early one where we forget almost everything, and a later one where we forget lots but less than we did before. As adults, we typically have almost no autobiographical memories from birth to two years old. My life story is much more likely to contain memories like how I discovered I had hypermobile joints by dislocating my kneecap and the summer I met my best friend and I lived in Amsterdam for a while and that’s why I know some Dutch – these are all important to my identity, just like the circumstances of my birth, and that importance is what makes them autobiographical.Īt least in Western societies, this lack of early childhood memories – called childhood amnesia - is very common. Now think about this: if you recounted your life story to someone, would all or even any of the events make an appearance? None of the ones in my list would. Here are some of mine: I watered some plants, I made a shopping list, I drank a cup of tea. To understand the distinction between episodic and autobiographical, consider the things that you have done recently. Episodic and autobiographical memory are subtly different - episodic memory tells us “this event happened”, while autobiographical memory tells us “this event happened and it is important to my sense of self”. This tells us something important about how memory functions, which is that there’s a division between recollection of knowledge (called semantic memory) and recollection of experience (called episodic memory or autobiographical memory). Well… I may not have the memory of the event, but I do have the knowledge of how my birth happened, which I gathered from my parents. So… has the memory of my birth disappeared? Or was it never there in the first place? Probably the same is true for you, though with a different set of facts. I know these things about my birth and yet I have no recollection of the events themselves. My parents were havering about how to spell my name so they asked the woman in the next bed over to help them decide, and that’s how I ended up Clare rather than Claire or Clair. I was born one night in the winter of 1983, in a small city in the southwest of Britain.
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