Chapter 10 Childhood Amnesia

It is true that memories from the first two years is not as accurate as we think. This situation is called childhood amnesia or sometimes called infantile amnesia. Childhood amnesia is basically the inability to remember events and experiences that occurred during the first two or three years of life. Even after that, memories are sketchy at best until about age six (Jack & Hayne, 2010). Many people get upset and even adamantly deny the idea of being a childhood amnesia victim. They just thought that they "remember" the events correctly even though those are merely reconstructions of their memories based on photographs, family stories, and imagination.

With all said, of course not all memories during the first two years are a false memories. We all still retain our procedural like when we first learned to use a fork and semantic memories like the rules of counting. Young children cannot start encode and retain their early episodic memories consistently until about age 4½ (Fivush & Nelson, 2004). This explains why the childhood amnesia occurred during the first two or three years of life.

 Memory researcher today think that repression has noting to do with childhood amnesia. Here are three major developments that affecting childhood amnesia:
  • Brain development: Researchers are saying that during the age 1-3 years, children brain are not well developed yet. They are also saying that due to the rapid addition of new neurons and how the new experiences of life affecting their brain, it will be difficult for them to focus and form a precise memory.
  • Cognitive development: For children who want to form a good memory, they have to develop their cognitive such as language so that they can recall it more easily. Even after their linguistic abilities have matured, it is still hard to recall the memory because those memories were not encoded linguistically (Simcock & Hayne, 2002).
  • Social development: This development is needed because it will helps children to be distinctive on what is important for them to remember rather than focus on the routine aspect of an experience.

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