Childhood amnesia in the making: Different distributions of autobiographical memories in children and adults.

Abstract

Within the memory literature, a robust finding is of childhood amnesia: a relative paucity among adults for autobiographical or personal memories from the first 3 to 4 years of life, and from the first 7 years, a smaller number of memories than would be expected based on normal forgetting. Childhood amnesia is observed in spite of strong evidence that during the period eventually obscured by the amnesia, children construct and preserve autobiographical memories. Why early memories seemingly are lost to recollection is an unanswered question. In the present research, we examined the issue by using the cue word technique to chart the distributions of autobiographical memories in samples of children ages 7 to 11 years and samples of young and middle-aged adults. Among adults, the distributions were best fit by the power function, whereas among children, the exponential function provided a better fit to the distributions of memories. The findings suggest that a major source of childhood amnesia is a constant rate of forgetting in childhood, seemingly resulting from failed consolidation, the outcome of which is a smaller pool of memories available for later retrieval.

Adults’ reports of their earliest memories: Consistency in events, ages, and narrative characteristics over time

“…We determined the breadth (or completeness) of the narratives using the coding scheme in Table 1 (Bauer, Burch, Scholin, & Güler, 2007; Bauer & Larkina, 2013). Participants were given 1 point for each of the narrative categories represented in the narrative.…”

Does recall of a past music event invoke a reminiscence bump in young adults?

“…First, the wording of the task is critical (Schuman & Corning, 2014;Schuman & Presser, 1981). If one instructs the participant to think back to their very first memory of music, there is likely to be a floor effect between the ages of 2 and 5, at or immediately after the development of autobiographical memory encoding (Bauer & Larkina, 2014;Tustin & Hayne, 2010). If, on the other hand, the participant is asked to think of any strong musical experience, the memory selection may be weighted towards recent events.…”

Short- and Long-term Memory during Infancy and Early Childhood across Cultures

“…Like a good newspaper story, a 'good' autobiographical narrative includes the who, what, where, when, why, and how of events. Younger children include fewer of these essential elements, relative to children 10-11 years of age (e.g., Bauer and Larkina, 2013;Bauer et al, 2007).…”

“…The younger the child, the greater the vulnerability. The vulnerability of memory traces in childhood contributes to more rapid forgetting of events and experiences, ultimately resulting in the phenomenon of childhood amnesia (the relative paucity of memories of events from the early years of life: Bauer and Larkina, 2013;Bauer et al, 2007).…”