Infantile Amnesia: Through a Glass Darkly

Abstract

Memory for former preschool classmates was examined in 9- and 10-year-old children using measures of both explicit and implicit memory. Yes-no recognition of faces was at low levels but was significantly above chance. Skin conductance data showed similarly low but above-chance differentiation between classmates and controls. A median split of children based on their recognition memory scores showed that children with little evidence of explicit memory for classmates were as likely to show differential skin conductance responding to faces of former classmates as were children with higher recognition scores. Infantile amnesia, like the clinical syndrome for which it is named, may not always involve complete loss of encoded information.

What Infant Memory Tells Us about Infantile Amnesia: Long-Term Recall and Deferred Imitation

“…These findings about infant memory raise a paradox about infantile amnesia, the difficulty aduits have in remembering events from the first years of life (for recent discussions see: Fivush & Hamond, 1990;Howe & Courage, 1993;Nelson, 1990;Newcombe & Fox, 1994;Pillemer & White, 1989;Usher & Neisser, 1993). One classic account of infantile amnesia is that infants cannot lay down memories of the proper type the first place.…”

“…It was disrupted both by research on memory in early childhood (Fivush & Hamond, 1989Nelson, 1989Nelson, , 1990Nelson, , 1993Newcombe & Fox, 1994;Pillemer, Picariello, & Pruett, 1994) and directly by findings on infant memory. Researchers provided surprising results about long-term retention in infancy.…”

On the development of conscious and unconscious memory.

“…Unconscious memory is said to involve definite feelings that items resemble presented material, but those feelings are not anchored in specific recollection of prior occurrences. Research on these two processes has produced a number of important results--for instance, that retrieval of verbatim traces of items' surface forms is involved in conscious memory and that retrieval of gist traces of their patterns and meanings is involved in unconscious memory (Brainerd, Reyna, & Brandse, 1995;Payne, Elie, Blackwell, & Neuschatz, 1996;Reyna & Brainerd, 1995a).Research on conscious versus unconscious memory is quite thin in the developmental literature, with only a few studies having been reported (e.g., Bullock Drummey & Newcombe, 1995;Newcombe & Fox, 1994;Newcombe & Lie, 1995;Russo, Nichelli, Gibertoni, & Cornia, 1995). Those studies have been concerned with questions such as whether above-chance performance on unconscious memory tests can be demonstrated in young children after long delays (Bullock Drummey & Newcombe, 1995;Newcombe & Fox, 1994), whether performance on unconscious memory tests exhibits age variability (Russo et al, 1995), and whether children's performance on unconscious memory tests is dissociated from their performance on conscious memory tests (Newcombe & Lie, 1995).…”

“…Research on conscious versus unconscious memory is quite thin in the developmental literature, with only a few studies having been reported (e.g., Bullock Drummey & Newcombe, 1995;Newcombe & Fox, 1994;Newcombe & Lie, 1995;Russo, Nichelli, Gibertoni, & Cornia, 1995). Those studies have been concerned with questions such as whether above-chance performance on unconscious memory tests can be demonstrated in young children after long delays (Bullock Drummey & Newcombe, 1995;Newcombe & Fox, 1994), whether performance on unconscious memory tests exhibits age variability (Russo et al, 1995), and whether children's performance on unconscious memory tests is dissociated from their performance on conscious memory tests (Newcombe & Lie, 1995).…”

“…Those studies have been concerned with questions such as whether above-chance performance on unconscious memory tests can be demonstrated in young children after long delays (Bullock Drummey & Newcombe, 1995;Newcombe & Fox, 1994), whether performance on unconscious memory tests exhibits age variability (Russo et al, 1995), and whether children's performance on unconscious memory tests is dissociated from their performance on conscious memory tests (Newcombe & Lie, 1995). The present article builds on these pioneering studies, focusing on the question of how to factor the contributions of conscious and uncon-C. J. Brainerd and L. M. Stein, College of Education, University of Arizona; V. E Reyna, Department of Surgery, University of Arizona.…”