All of us suffer from a particular kind of forgetting called childhood amnesia. However impressive our memory might be, our ability to remember events from the first three or four years of our lives is extremely poor – no matter how many fascinating things occurred.
The paradox of childhood amnesia is that young children themselves are not amnesia. As all parents know, children under the age of two years have a keen awareness and can quickly and easily learn a tremendous number of things about the world. It is also not the case that everything that is learned early in life is eventually forgotten. Adults have retained a great deal that they learned in early childhood, including the meanings of words and appropriate emotional reactions to objects, smells, and sounds. But what they cannot remember is the events that happened to them, even if these were supremely impressive at the time.
Explained Childhood amnesia
The first notable explanation for the phenomenon came from Sigmund Freud. He believed that childhood amnesia resulted when people repressed their infantile sexual impulses, and one of the goals of psychoanalysis was to bring these repressed memories back into consciousness. Although Freud’s writings on childhood amnesia and other topics make for fascinating and provocating reading, modern psychologists have not found much support for these ideas. It is now known that childhood amnesia results from the relatively slow development of one particular kind of memory, episodic memory. This type of memory allows us to travel back into the past and re-live past events mentally. Episodic memory is not necessary for learning facts about the world. Still, it is needed to relate, for example, that ‘last Wednesday, I ate a turkey sandwich and saw a squirrel in the garden.’
The relative immaturity of episodic memory in very young children leads to some curious effects. When children aged three or younger are asked to describe what usually happens at nursery school, they can often give a very impressive general account of the school day and describe a number of activities that they commonly participate in. But when the same children are asked in the evening to describe particular events from that day at school, they are often unable to report even a single thing. This lack of episodic memory in young children means that in later life, they will be similarly unable to recollect moments from these first few years.
The maturing Brain
There are several factors involved in episodic memories. One is the physical maturation of the Brain itself, including the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. It is not until these areas are relatively mature that children are able to register episodic memories so that they can be recollected later. Also important is a young child’s sense of identity, or ‘self.’ In order to properly organize and retain episodic memories, children must realize that they are enduring entities with a past, a present, and a future, and such a realization is not secure until around the age of three.
A question of Colour
Young children sometimes give surprising answers to seemingly straightforward questions. This is something that researchers have been able to make use of in their investigation of episodic memory in young children.
Children aged three, four, and five years were taught to recognize colors with unusual names such as ‘ chartreuse’ and ‘taupe.’ A few minutes later, all the children were able to identify quickly and confidently the newly learned colors.
Next, the researchers asked,’ How long have you known these colors?’ While all the five-year-olds were clear that they had just been taught them, all the three-year-olds and many four-year-olds claimed they had always known the colors. It is not until age four or five years that children can reliably remember specific previous events.
