A 2‐year‐old child's memory of hospitalization during early infancy

Abstract

A child who had had surgery at 5 months of age, and who had been treated at the time for post‐traumatic symptoms (reported in a previous paper by the author), was interviewed 2 years later and almost 3 years later to test for possible verbal recall of his hospitalization. He appeared to have some memories of the experience at 29 months of age, and he was able to superimpose verbal labels onto the preverbal memories. At 40 months of age, however, the memories were no longer verbally accessible. The results are discussed in the context of different theories of encoding, storage, retrieval, and loss of early memories. The findings from this study support other findings indicating that there appears to be some form of long‐term memory in place early in life, at least for highly salient, traumatic events. There may be one memory system for traumatic memories, fully functional at birth, and a later developing, different system for neutral memories. It is further hypothesized that there may be a sensitive period around 2–3 years of age for the recall of early traumatic memories, and that verbal recall is more likely to be present in verbally precocious children during that period. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Children's memories for events relating to treatment for eye cancer: Influence of age at loss of eye

“…However, identifying the time points when interventions or equivalent are likely to be optimal hinges, at least partially, on understanding the extent to which infants who are identified as "preverbal" at the time of the traumatic experiences are subsequently able to verbally access the memories. As evidence suggests (discussed later), and as noted by Solter (2008), this issue remains contentious, with research evidence inconclusive.…”

“…One case study (Solter, 2008) of a child with precocious language development showed that memory of hospitalization for cranial surgery at 5 months of age showed memories to be verbally accessible at 29 months, but not later at 40 months. One interpretation of this was that a longterm memory system is likely to assimilate traumatic memories, making them available for later verbal access, but only between the second and third years.…”

Developmental Changes in Memory-Related Linguistic Skills and Their Relationship to Episodic Recall in Children

“…As expected, children were less likely to acknowledge having experienced an event or to provide related details successfully without a helpful prompt [ 16 , 37 ]. Thus, following the method used in previous studies [ 19 , 22 , 23 ], children were gradually supplied with several cues when they did not answer the question. Although the majority of cues about past events were purely verbal, the experimenter occasionally used objects such as toys and tools as cues.…”

“…For example, Peterson and colleagues [ 19 – 21 ] examined children’s recall for single-instance traumatic injuries experienced between the ages of 13 and 34 months by asking each child to verbally recall the event on multiple occasions up to the age of 60 months. Solter [ 22 ] examined one child’s recall of a surgery experienced at the age of 5 months by asking the child about it at 29 months and at 40 months. Cleveland and Reese [ 23 ] examined the recall of 65-month-old children for non-traumatic early life events.…”