Discuss the theories that seek to explain why we don't remember events from infancy. Use research evidence to reach conclusions as to which theories that you discuss offers the most accurate explanation for this phenomena.

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Student Number: 1516238

340PY: Developmental Cognitive Psychology

Module Leader: Laura Taylor

Marker: Laura Taylor

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Discuss the theories that seek to explain why we don’t remember events from infancy. Use research evidence to reach conclusions as to which theories that you discuss offers the most accurate explanation for this phenomena.

Charlotte Green

Discuss the theories that seek to explain why we don’t remember events from infancy. Use research evidence to reach conclusions as to which theories that you discuss offers the most accurate explanation for this phenomena.

        As adults we very rarely remember what happened in our life as infants, this has been labelled as infantile amnesia. This phenomenon has been researched since 1893, however it was Sigmund Freud who began the major research in the area, which has continued to today. Freud was very interested in this area, and originally proposed that this amnesia lasted till about 6/7 years old. However later research has contradicted this saying the amnesia only lasts for the first 2/3 years of your life,

(Perlmutter, 1986). Many theorists have tried to describe this phenomenon, resulting in many different explanations, although many of the explanations have drawbacks, which leads to the constant development in the field.

        An early notion from Freud to explain infantile amnesia was that we just repress the memories from our childhood, as we feel guilty "What I have in mind is the peculiar amnesia which, in the case of most people, though by no means all, hides the earliest beginnings of their childhood up to their sixth or eight year." (Freud, 1905/1953). Therefore we are unable to retrieve those memories, especially from the anal and genital stages, as proposed by Freud. He suggested that we repress traumatic memories from infancy so we don’t have to re-live them, as they were either embarrassing or we felt guilty of how we thought and behaved.

There hasn’t been a lot of evidence that can support Freud’s repression theory, as it is quite basic. One bit of research that does support it is a study that looked at high students who were asked to recall their earliest memory. At first the students had a very late first memory, and it was often of a traumatic event. A later second test showed that a considerable amount of the students recalled a different less traumatic first memory (Kihlstrom, et al., 1982). This research supports the theory that we forget the more traumatic memories. However if this theory were to be true that we forgot traumatic memories, then this would surely continue into our adulthood, the fact it doesn’t shows that this isn’t an explanation for infantile amnesia, as it’s not consistent to the theory.

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        A second theory for the explanation of infantile amnesia is that as young children the brain is not equipped to keep the memories which may be formed. As infants the brain appears to still carry a survival mode, only learning what is needed to survive until it can form fully. Hence keeping anecdotal memories isn’t as useful for infants, so we don’t. This would result in there being no event memories for us to remember as adults. Although a study carried out by Meltzoff in 1995 proved this theory wrong. Here infants where shown a novel event of an experimenter ...

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