What's your earliest memory?
Whatever you recall, it's unlikely you'll bring back memories before the ages of three or four because of a phenomenon called infantile amnesia, or the inability of adults to remember the earliest years of life. Recent research explores the range of time in which children's memories of early childhood disappear or become clearer with time.
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The findings: The older kids get, the greater the age of their first memory.
In a longitudinal study featured in the journal Child Development, researchers revisited 140 children of different age groups and asked them follow-up questions about their earliest memories. The team compared the results to what the same children said two years ago in order to learn how childhood memories change in time among various age groups.
In the first and current study, children were asked to recall their three earliest memories. Younger children were generally better than older ones at bringing up memories before the ages of three and four, but they were inconsistent through time. Basically, they didn't recall the same memories when asked two years later.
Older kids, however, were better at recalling the same earliest memories, but the overall ages of memories increased as well.
This trend supports the idea that older children are better than their younger counterparts at remembering the same events throughout time and helps explain how infantile amnesia changes between early childhood and adulthood.
Photo by tanya_little/Flickr.com
Tags: Child Development
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