A complementary processes account of the development of childhood amnesia and a personal past.

Abstract

Personal-episodic or autobiographical memories are an important source of evidence for continuity of self over time. Numerous studies conducted with adults have revealed a relative paucity of personal-episodic or autobiographical memories of events from the first 3 to 4 years of life, with a seemingly gradual increase in the number of memories until approximately age 7 years, after which an adult distribution has been assumed. Historically, this so-called infantile amnesia or childhood amnesia has been attributed either to late development of personal-episodic or autobiographical memory (implying its absence in the early years of life) or to an emotional, cognitive, or linguistic event that renders early autobiographical memories inaccessible to later recollection. However, neither type of explanation alone can fully account for the shape of the distribution of autobiographical memories early in life. In contrast, the complementary processes account developed in this article acknowledges early, gradual development of the ability to form, retain, and later retrieve memories of personally relevant past events, as well as an accelerated rate of forgetting in childhood relative to adulthood. The adult distribution of memories is achieved as (a) the quality of memory traces increases, through addition of more, better elaborated, and more tightly integrated personal-episodic or autobiographical features; and (b) the vulnerability of mnemonic traces decreases, as a result of more efficient and effective neural, cognitive, and specifically mnemonic processes, thus slowing the rate of forgetting. The perspective brings order to an array of findings from the adult and developmental literatures.

Development of episodic and autobiographical memory: The importance of remembering forgetting

“…That is, they do not attend to developmental changes in the rate at which memory traces are forgotten. The argument developed in this review (see also Bauer, 2015) is that focus on positive change alone fails to account for why the development of memory takes the forms that it does. The argument applies to episodic memory in general, and to autobiographical memory—memory for personally relevant past events—and explanation of the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, in particular.…”

“…For example, we attribute better retention over time to more veridical encoding (e.g., Ornstein, Baker-Ward, & Naus, 1988), to more nuanced differentiation of the details of one event or experience relative to another (e.g., Bauer & Lukowski, 2010; Riggins, 2014), to greater precision locating events in time (Friedman, 2014) and place (Lourenco & Frick, 2014), to more robust and autonomous retrieval processes (e.g., Roebers, 2014), and to increases in autonoetic awareness (Tulving, 2005; Wheeler, 2000), to name a few. All of these changes contribute to the formation of memory representations that are of higher quality, through addition of more, better elaborated, and more tightly integrated features (Bauer, 2015). The result is a higher quality memory trace and more robust remembering.…”

“…If no memories are formed, there is no need to explain why they are not apparent. Evidence that even infants form and retain episodic memories, and that preschool and early school age children form and retain autobiographical memories, has been reviewed in detail elsewhere (e.g., Bauer, 2007, 2013, 2014, 2015; Lukowski & Bauer, 2014). For this reason, I provide a brief review here.…”

“…And as they approach and enter the third year of life and gain the fluency to provide verbal descriptions of events experienced in imitation-based tasks, children spontaneously verbalize about who took part in the events ( who ) and they provide evaluative comments on the activities in which they engaged ( subjective perspective; Bauer & Wewerka, 1997). These behaviors make clear that sometimes well before they provide linguistic evidence, children encode, retain, and later retrieve memory representations that feature each of the individual elements associated with autobiographical memory (see Bauer, 2007, 2015; Bauer & Leventon, 2013, for discussions).…”

“…The major argument of the review is that focus on developmental increases in the quality of representations of past events and experiences will tell only a part of the story of how memory develops. A more complete account is afforded when we also consider changes in forgetting (see Bauer, 2015, for a review).…”