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Childhood memory

Early life experiences often memorable for life

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Development of memory in childhood

Childhood memories have several unique qualities. The experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Endel Tulving refers to memory as “mental time travel”, a process unique to humans. However, early memories are notoriously sparse from the perspective of an adult trying to recall his or her childhood in depth. Explicit knowledge of the world is a form of declarative memory, which can be broken down further into semantic memory, and episodic memory, which encompasses both autobiographical memory and event memory. Most people have no memory prior to three years of age, and few memories between three and six years of age, as verified by analysis of the forgetting curve in adults recalling childhood memories.

Childhood memory research is relatively recent, having gained significant amounts of scientific interest within the last two decades. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the mechanisms underpinning childhood memory. Until relatively recently, it was thought that children have only a very general memory and that “overwrite mechanisms” prevented the later retrieval of early memories. Newer research suggests that very young children do remember novel events, and these events can be recalled in detail from as young as two and a half years old. Previous research presupposed that children remember pieces of information from specific events but generally do not keep episodic memories. Contrary to previous research, newer research has shown that children can recall specific episodic memories for up to two years prior to the onset of the earliest autobiographical memories reported by adults. The same research argues against the Freudian theory that early memories are repressed because of negative affective content.

Another older hypothesis that has been thrown into question is that of the prominent psychologists Daniel Schacter (1974) and Ulrich Neisser (1962), who hypothesized that memories are forgotten because cognitive schemas change between childhood and adulthood, meaning that information is lost with an adult's reconstruction of childhood events because present (adult) schemas are not suitable. Schemas change drastically around age six due to socialization and language development. However, as highlighted by katherine Nelson this theory has received criticism. Recent data suggest that a preschooler's schemas are not dramatically different from the older child's or the adult's, meaning that the ways of representing and interpreting reality do not change markedly from childhood to adulthood. Tests of very young children and adults show that in all age groups, memory recall shows the same sequential cause-and-effect pattern. One interpretation is that childhood memories differ from adult memories mainly in what is noticed: an adult and a child experiencing an event both notice different aspects of the event, and will have different memories of the same event. For example, a child may not show remarkable memory for events that an adult would see as truly novel, such as the birth of a sibling, or a plane trip to visit relatives. Conversely, children show stronger memories for aspects of experiences that adults find unremarkable. Therefore, the schematic organization hypothesis of childhood amnesia may be inadequate to explain what is remembered and later recalled.

Another theory that has gained attention is the social interaction model of autobiographical memory development, or the means by which social interaction influences ability to remember specific events in the context of a life narrative. The social interaction model describes the way in which a child develops the ability to construct memories as narratives when the child has the opportunity to discuss events with others, such as parents. Parenting style is highly relevant to this theory. For example, different parents will ask different numbers of memory-relevant questions, will try to elicit different types of memory, and will frame the discussions in different ways. Nelson (1992) describes two different parenting styles: pragmatic and elaborative. Pragmatic mothers use primarily instrumental instructions that are relevant to a task the child is performing, whereas elaborative mothers construct narratives with the child about what they and the child did together. An elaborative style yields more detailed memories of events. The same researcher who found these results also made reference to Tessler's studies (1986, 1991) of memory for events in childhood. In these studies, children were taken on a trip to a museum. A week later, aspects of the trip and items that were seen in the museum were only recalled if they had been discussed at the time of the trip. Items that were not talked about were not recalled.

Although previous hypotheses have suggested that the role of the memory talk is active rehearsal, newer research suggests that its role might be reinstatement. In the context of infant memory studies, a learned response (example: playing with a mobile) that would otherwise be forgotten can be reinstated if the context is re-presented within a given time period. In this sense, verbal rehearsal of events between a child and a family member might serve to reinstate the cognitive context of the original event.

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