(Department of Psychology, Emory University, United States)

As adults, we retain memories of personally meaningful events for decades. Yet we have difficulty recalling events from our early childhood, and most adults cannot recall events that occurred before the age of about 3 or 4 years, a phenomenon labeled “childhood amnesia.” Whereas early explanations of childhood amnesia assumed this paucity of early memories was due to serious deficiencies in the early memory system, more recent research has established that children as young as 2-3 years are able to give accurate detailed descriptions of at least some personally experienced events. Thus, the phenomenon of childhood amnesia becomes even more enigmatic. If young children are able to recall the events of their lives, why are we unable to recall these events as we grow older? In this paper, I describe a series of studies examining the long-term retention of memories from early childhood. Children between the ages of 2 and 10 years were asked to recall events across multiple interviews at various retention intervals. Across different studies, children were asked to recall both emotionally positive events, such as a family trip to Disneyworld, as well as more emotionally negative and stressful events, such as experiencing a severe hurricane. Overall, children show remarkably good memories of distinctive events over periods of many years, although the content of what children report changes. Further, as children grow older, they are able to provide more information, and more detailed information, in response to open-ended free recall questions even though time since the event was experienced has increased. These results indicate that the offset of childhood amnesia is a complex outcome of multiple factors, including distinctiveness of the event, rehearsal, and developing language skills. The roles of each of these factors is discussed and a model of childhood amnesia and its’ offset is outlined.

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