The world looks very different to a person whose head is only two or three feet above the ground than to one whose head is five or six feet above it. This view is supported by a variety of factors that can create mismatches between very young children's encoding and older children's and adults' retrieval efforts. The better able the person is to reconstruct the perspective from which the material was encoded, the more likely that recall will be successful. Whether people can remember an event depends critically on the fit between the way in which they earlier encoded the information and the way in which they later attempt to retrieve it. Telling such stories to two year olds does not seem to produce long-lasting verbalizable memories.Ī third likely explanation for infantile amnesia involves incompatibilities between the ways in which infants encode information and the ways in which older children and adults retrieve it. However, hearing such stories is not sufficient for younger children to form enduring memories. Consistent with this view, parents and children increasingly engage in discussions of past events when children are about three years old. Through hearing stories with a clear beginning, middle, and ending children may learn to extract the gist of events in ways that they will be able to describe many years later. Hearing and telling stories about events may help children store information in ways that will endure into later childhood and adulthood. The brain's level of physiological maturation may support these types of memories, but not ones requiring explicit verbal descriptions.Ī second explanation involves the influence of the social world on children's language use. Demonstrations of infants' and toddlers' long-term memory have involved their repeating motor activities that they had seen or done earlier, such as reaching in the dark for objects, putting a bottle in a doll's mouth, or pulling apart two pieces of a toy. Maturation of the frontal lobes of the brain continues throughout early childhood, and this part of the brain may be critical for remembering particular episodes in ways that can be retrieved later. One involves physiological changes relevant to memory.
Three other explanations seem more promising. While such repression may occur, people cannot remember ordinary events from the infant and toddler periods either. Nor does the hypothesis that infantile amnesia reflects repression-or holding back-of sexually charged episodes explain the phenomenon. Children two and a half to three years old remember experiences that occurred in their first year, and eleven month olds remember some events a year later. Another seemingly plausible explanation-that infants do not form enduring memories at this point in development-also is incorrect. How might this inability to recall early experiences be explained? The sheer passage of time does not account for it adults have excellent recognition of pictures of people who attended high school with them 35 years earlier. Most people remember only a few events-usually ones that were meaningful and distinctive, such as being hospitalized or a sibling’s birth. Adults’ memories of the next few years also tend to be scanty. What do you remember about your life before you were three? Few people can remember anything that happened to them in their early years.
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