Children Apparently Can Remember Their Memories as a Baby

Children are able to recall memories from the age of 18 months, but forget it between the ages of four and seven years old. Previously it was considered that children under the age of four do not have the cognitive ability to recall those times. The assumption that many people believed is that many adults can not remember the experience of infancy.

But researchers at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada found that children as young as four can remember their baby memories. Carole Peterson, psychology professor who conducted the study, said that his team found that children who are very young have a lot of baby memories.

“So, it is clear that previous explanations were wrong, because children have the cognitive, linguistic and memory ability to talk about things that happened in their past,” She said, according to the DailyMail.

“The infantile amnesia phenomenon is clearly a moving target in children, because when children grows from 4 to 10 years, their memories retreat,” she added. “But at the age of 10, the memories seem to crystallize.”

Peterson’s team interviewed 140 children aged 4 to 13 years, by asking them to describe three of the earliest memories they can remember. Strangely most young children can recall their memories from 18 months.

All parents were presented to confirm whether their statements actually happened. The team then re-interviewed the children two years later, and asked them to recall all the same early memories.

The researchers found that those aged between four and seven when first interviewed could not recall their earliest memories – even when given specific instructions.

However, one third of children between the ages of 10 and 13 years at the start of the study recalled the same memory at both time points.

The results indicate that long and solid memories are formed at or after the age of 10 years old, before these memories become more fragile and fades.

The study, published in the ‘Child Development’ journal shows that our ‘childhood psychology’ started more slowly than previously thought.

Peterson added, “When we lose the memories in the early times, which we remembered earlier, then we lose part of our childhood – basically, we then lose all or nearly all of the events that happened to us.”

One other explanation may be that very young children encode their memory in a different way than older children, according to Patricia Bauer from Emory University.