Extensive research on autobiographical memory has illustrated that few people remember very much of what happened before the age of two or three, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia.

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Extensive research on autobiographical memory has illustrated that few people remember very much of what happened before the age of two or three, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. The missing memories are episodic in nature, not semantic or procedural, which means that adults have no problem remembering the skills, language and social customs they acquired in infancy, while episodic/event memories are not properly retained. Since Freud directed the academic attention towards this phenomenon, various theoretical approaches have been put forward in order to explain it. Some of these approaches that will be reviewed here, suggest that due to context or encoding differences between early childhood and adulthood these early memories will become inaccessible. An important dimension of this approach suggests that the language in a young child is still developing, so that the mind changes in ways that make very early memories inaccessible. Another line of argument proposes that autobiographical memories develop after the cognitive self, seen as the primary knowledge structure, becomes functional. In this respect, the ‘personalisation’ of events is what makes them accessible in a later situation. Considering the nature of infantile amnesia and our limited knowledge of the functioning of memory, it is understandable that methodological and explanation difficulties occur, which make in infantile amnesia remain a mystery in spite all our efforts.      

The study of infantile amnesia poses inherent methodological difficulties. First of all, asking adults to recall their earliest memories is methodologically unsafe, as the memories may be confabulated and estimates far from precise. Thus, these reported early memories is hard to verify, while there are problems distinguishing between ‘told’ memories and ‘true’ memories. Indeed, identifying events that are of importance to a child that can be precisely dated and verified by a third party can be a difficult task. However, it has been suggested that the birth of a brother or sister falls into this category of salient for the child events, and has thus been investigated in a number of studies. Sheingold and Tenney, 1982, asked 4, 6, 8 and 12-year-olds and college students to recall the birth of a brother or sister when they were 3 to 11 years old. The results confirmed the phenomenon of infantile amnesia, revealing a clear age effect with children under 3 at the time showing little rememberance, while 3 to 5-year-olds recalled almost as much as older children. Infantile amnesia also poses problems in explanation, considering the great variation among individuals of age of earliest memories and our limited knowledge on memory. A second problem is that children are not amnesic about their past but can give accounts of past events, which suggests either these early memories are of a different kind, or that they are retrieved in different ways.

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Freud (1916/1963) was the first to call our attention to the void where memories for life events begin. Freud suggested that infantile amnesia results from children’s repression of their sexual feelings towards their parents. These repressed memories supposedly lie in the unconscious and influence one’s actions and personality. However, no evidence so far has provided support for this theory, which seems to assume that forgetting requires explanation, while remembering does not. In this respect, it has been shown that children’s memory for traumatic emergency hospital treatment is no different than non-traumatic events (Howe, et al. 1994, as cited ...

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