Infantile amnesia has been studied for over a century, and there’s still much that’s unknown. The researchers asserted that as the brain continues to create these neurons-through a process called neurogenesis-it must clear out older memories to make room. Only recently have scientists begun to understand the neurological underpinnings of this inevitable loss.Ī 2014 study in Science found that throughout infancy, childhood, and into adulthood, new neurons are born within a particular part of the hippocampus involved in memory and forgetting. As teens and adults, we are left with the stories we have heard about being little, along with incomplete fragments of events (if any at all). Before we get into middle school most of the evocative impressions we may have held onto from toddlerhood to elementary school have vanished. Still, not many that happen between three-and-a-half and puberty survive throughout life. Most memories, if they do survive, come to adults with more clarity if they happened around or after age three-and-a-half. Questions remained: What kinds of memories endured? What kinds were lost? How long could these early memories stick around? And when and why did most eventually disappear for good?Īdults can rarely tap into recollections from before two-even memories of something dramatic like a death, a birth, a hospitalization, or a family move. That notion began to change through the 1980s and 1990s with evidence that even babies could learn and retain information over short stretches of time. Many psychologists used to believe that the brains of infants and toddlers were not developed enough to embed salient long-term memories. I want to peer inside her mind and see for myself what she thinks she remembers. “Do you remember being a baby?” I ask, knowing it may be a trick question. “Babies don’t get nail polish,” she says, looking down to admire her toddler feet. Her eyes fixate on the feet of the squirming infant on screen. My daughter requested this clip out of more than 400, all starring her, most of which she has watched before. She cringes as she sees her smaller self cringe. The three-year-old girl with pink paint-chipped toenails watches my iPhone video of that day when Daddy bathed her for the first time. We are new parents delighting in and stumbling through this moment. “Make sure you get the folds in her neck, where milk hides,” I say, video recording the scene on my iPhone. This finding has important implications for current explanations of childhood amnesia.The slippery baby in the plastic blue tub cringes when her daddy, holding a drippy orange washcloth, leaks a bit of water in her face. We found that the distribution of adults' early childhood memories may be less continuous than pooled data suggest. Six adults were repeatedly interviewed about their childhood memories. In the present study we examined the number and distribution of childhood memories for individual participants. Alternatively, it is possible that pooling data across participants has obscured more abrupt, stage-like changes in the remission of childhood amnesia. Typically, this finding has been used to argue that gradual changes in memory development contribute to a gradual decline in childhood amnesia during the preschool period. If we plot the number of memories that adults can recall as a function of age during childhood, the number of memories reported increases gradually as a function of age. The term childhood amnesia refers to the inability of adults to remember events from their infancy and early childhood.
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