Most people cannot remember anything before the age of 2 or 3 at the earliest – and these are usually memories of vital or emotional events, such as the birth of a sibling. We know that memories people recall before the ages of 2 or 3 are generally due to someone else recalling an event and can be revised as time goes on. The fact that most of us aren’t able to remember anything before the age of 2 or 3 is referred to as infantile amnesia. We don’t know for sure why infantile amnesia occurs, but there are some theories.
One older theory that has been disproven is that infants are incapable of forming any kind of memories. We now know that this is not true, as babies remember their mother’s face a few hours after birth. By the time infants are just a few months old, they smile at familiar faces – illustrating their ability to remember and recognize those who are closest and most important in their lives.
In an attempt to study their memory skills, Carolyn Rovee-Collier created an activity for infants under 6 months. In this task, the babies were placed in a crib under a mobile, and their normal kicking activity was measured. Rovee-Collier then added a string to the mix – tying it from the infant’s leg to the mobile, so that every time the infant would kick, the mobile would move. After learning this connection, that they were in charge of the mobile moving, the infants would start to kick a lot more than they did at first. To connect this to infant memory, the intention here was to test whether the infants could remember that they could make the mobile move a couple of days later. The research findings illustrated that 2-month-old infants could remember this and would start kicking right when they saw the mobile, even after one or two days. Although the youngest infants could only remember this connection for a couple of days, the older the infants got, the longer they could remember this connection. This research taught us that we could definitely form memories from infancy, meaning that the inability of forming memories was not what caused infantile amnesia.
It is important to note that the type of memory that was tested in this study by Rovee-Collier is called procedural memory – which refers to remembering the events of how to do something or how something works. The type of memories we think of when remembering past events are called autobiographical memories – which are more about remembering something that happened to us in our lives. Autobiographical memory usually requires a sense of time passing, which is not something that infants have. Additionally, forming this type of memory requires a sense of self, which doesn’t develop until about 18 months. Before about 12-18 months, infants cannot store information with language – making it much more difficult to remember a story. The hippocampus, largely responsible for keeping memories, is not fully developed in infancy. The reason for infantile amnesia is still unclear, but it is likely a result of one or a combination of these factors. There is also research proving that children’s memories throughout the preschool age can be misconstrued and changed based on misleading information – causing them to make false memories.
It is vital to understand that memories are imperfect, and are likely to change over time as they are retold by others and shared throughout the years.
Ethel Dvoskin
Research Assistant, UConn KIDS
Article Link:https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-baby-scientist/202204/why-we-can-t-remember-our-youngest-years