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 in Howe & Courage, 1997). Another approach lacking support from empirical data asserts that there could be neurological constraints on how well infants learn and retain information in the early years. For example, Schachter and Moscovitch (1984) tried to associate infantile amnesia with brain immaturity in the areas of the hippocampus and the pre-frontal cortex. In this respect, it is suggested that young children depend on implicit learning that does not provide the basis for experiences to be recollected. However, as already mentioned, this hypothesis lacks of evidence of a change in neurological functioning at some age that will determine the end of infantile amnesia. Methodological problems also seem to apply, since the research was carried out on monkeys and rats, in which case it is uncertain whether these animals can have explicit memories or not.
One of the most dedicated researchers on the study of infantile amnesia Rovee-Collier (1989), showed that an infant who finds that kicking makes a mobile move in interesting ways will keep on kicking, while given the appropriate cues and reminders it will do so again at a later occasion. Apparently, infants can learn to respond to specific stimuli, and can retain their learning over a period of weeks. Rovee-Collier’s (1989) results further suggest that babies do appear to be able to acquire something analogous to a concept. She concluded that learning in infancy seems to be context sensitive, since recall did not occur in different settings than the learning phase. Finally, according to these findings it appears that infants’ learning is relatively specific and context-dependent, but given the appropriate conditions they do appear to generalise what they have learned. Another intriguing study with amazing implications for the development of autobiographical memory was carried out from Nelson in 1988. It is the single case of a little girl called Emily, who had the habit of talking to herself before going to sleep. Her monologues were recorded and analysed from when she was 21 months, until she stopped doing it at 36 months. Since the beginning of the study, Emily was recalling events from two months before, while her monologue appeased generally unstructured (e.g. Christmas). Some of her memories went six months back, while other followed of the previous day. At 24 months she started formulating explicit rules and generalisations, or speculations about the future. This case makes clear that episodic memory at 21 months did occur. It also suggests that semantic and episodic memory develop interactively. In this respect, it has been shown that order children are better at separating specific episodes from a developing generic or semantic memory (Hudson, 1984).
One explanation offered for infantile amnesia suggests early memories are inaccessible because they were not encoded in the same way as adult memories. In this respect, it has been argued that the difference lies is that children’s memories are encoded in a pre-linguistic form involving different conceptual categories than adults, which difference in conceptualisation supposed to be responsible for the lack of access to these early memories. (Neisser, 1962). Nelson (1986) found that young children are better at generic recall rather than episodic, that is they can more easily describe “what we do in playschool” than “what happened in playschool today”. Farther more young children seem to acquire episodic memory before they acquire narrative (Fivush, et. al. 1987). From the aforesaid one may argue that children do remember life events but lack the schemata that would enable them to recall these events in a systematic way. If talking about the past is a skill, then it is something that one must learn how to do and it develops like any other skill through ageing, social support, and practice. Those schemata, although not fully understood yet, are supposed to include some representation of one’s own continuity through time. Consequently, it has been suggested that the life narrative is what marks the end of infantile amnesia. Mullen, 1994, put those claims into the test, and found that birth order and reported age of first memory were significantly correlated with later-born children reporting earliest memories. This is attributed to the negative correlation between children’s birth order and the talking time they got to spend with their parents. Another important finding of Mullen, 1994, suggests that culture is an important determinant, as talking time between children and their parents varies from one culture to another. This suggests that recalling life experience is a form of expertise that some cultural customs encourage more strongly, resultung in the development of earliest memories than others (Mullen, 1994).
On the other hand, Howe and Courage (1993) argue that an important development inn childhood involves the ‘personalisation’ of memories. Autobiographical memories are, thus, seen as natural outcomes of developments in related domains in the ‘software’ that drives general memory functioning. In this respect, it is argued that the same variables that affect in the same way memory in the postnatal years, childhood and adulthood. Thus, neurological and perceptual changes during the first two years of life cannot uniquely account for the emergence of autobiographical memory (Howe & Courage, 1993). Hence, a qualitative shift in the neural ‘hardware’ during memory development that causes infantile amnesia cannot be assumed. Having reviewed the literature, Howe and Courage (1997) concluded that autobiographical memory emerges at the same time with the cognitive self, whose features help organise personally experienced memories. The self, like other knowledge structures, supposedly begins organising at birth and becomes functional, that is affecting memory behaviour in this case, after it reaches a certain viability. The origin of the cognitive self is considered as “no different than other knowledge structures that serve to organise memory in its early life and it derives from nonverbal representations and experience that become verbalisable only after they are fully functioning cognitive entities”. Howe and Courage, 1997, further present the evidence from studies on receptive language, gesturing and gesture-language transitions, which confirm the primacy of the development of the cognitive self in the development of autobiographical memory.
As is apparent from Rovee-Collier’s (1989) experiment, two and three month-old babies can learn complex associations, while children who are just beginning to talk seem to be capable of recalling specific events well before that time. Although infants do learn and remember, the rapid rate of forgetting the two-month-olds (and less the three-month-olds) exhibited suggests that the problem may not be failure to store information, but failure to retrieve it. Furthemore, the results do not support the view that an infant’s brain is not mature enough to lay down episodic memories. The lack of agreement surrounding infantile amnesia probably reflects our lack of knowledge of how memory functions. It seems, however, that infants are able to retain episodic memmories, although these memories may later become inaccessible. One could argue that both encoding and retrieval difficulties affect retainment of autobiographical memories. It seems possible that in infancy we are constructing our internal view of the world that will later provide the basis for explicit retrieval of experienced events. Future research should focus on the external factors that influence the development of autobiographical memory , in rder to shed more light to the infantile amnesia phenomenon. In this respect, the way in which parents interact with their children is a promising area with long-term implications, as is the further examination of the effect of different cultures. It seems that a more coherent approach would consider allaspects of cognitive development in interaction. Whether the most important knowledge structure is language development or the cognitive self is something that will be illustrated by their interaction, although until now the cognitive self thesis seems more strong.