Childhood Amnesia: Causes, Testing, and Psychology

Introduction

Childhood amnesia, commonly known as infantile amnesia, is the scarcity or lack of autobiographical recollections among adults regarding incidents that took place in early life, especially events that occurred before they turned four years old. Generally, most adults have no recollections of events that took place before age three. Childhood amnesia is usually assessed by asking adults to recall their earliest memory, especially specific target incidents that happened during early life. As a result, the emergence of autobiographical memory is generally regarded as marking the end of childhood amnesia. Childhood amnesia is an important topic in the field of psychology with respect to understanding an individual's life development. The topic is also vital because it provides significant insights that help in understanding memory.

Background Information

Childhood amnesia, or infantile amnesia, is essentially described as the scarcity or lack of autobiographical recollections among adults for incidents that took place during early life, especially before age four (Peterson, Grant, & Boland, 2005, p. 622). An adult can also be considered to have childhood amnesia if he or she is seemingly unable to remember significant events that happened before age ten, as might be expected during this period. While brain structures such as the limbic system are involved in retaining memory during the first two years of life, they have not yet been completely developed at that stage. Based on research findings, children have the ability to recollect events from before age four, though these memories decline as they grow older.

Childhood amnesia is a concept that was first introduced in 1893 by psychologist Caroline Miles in her study of individual psychology. The concept was later developed by Henri and Henri, who examined individual psychology and suggested that the earliest recollections of memory occur between ages two and four. One of the major psychologists who played a crucial role in developing the concept of childhood amnesia is Sigmund Freud. Freud provided what is arguably the most renowned and controversial definition and explanation of this concept in 1910. Through the use of psychoanalytic theory, Freud argued that recollection of events in early life is difficult because these incidents are suppressed given their unsuitable sexual nature. However, he also discovered that most of his patients had difficulties remembering their earliest memories, particularly events that took place before ages six to eight.

Even though scientists have known about childhood amnesia for over a century, they only began to examine when childhood memories start to fade in recent decades. These investigations also involved determining which childhood memories are likely to fade and how adults develop a full autobiography without explicit memories of early life (Hamilton, 2014). Scientists had traditionally assumed that childhood amnesia occurred because the brains of young children could not create lasting memories of certain incidents. However, this belief was tested in the 1980s by Bauer and other researchers, who examined the memories of children as young as nine months using objects and gestures rather than words. The tests revealed that children as young as two years old had very strong memories for certain past events. These findings raised questions about why adults have difficulty recollecting this period of their lives.

These concerns led to additional studies, which demonstrated that people tend to lose access to their earliest memories during certain periods in childhood. One study showed that seven-year-old children could still recollect over 60% of events that took place in the early stages of their lives. However, by age eight or nine, these same children could remember less than 40% of their earliest memories. The researchers concluded that this transitional period marks the beginning of childhood amnesia.

Children at age two have some ability to recall their earliest memories, as they can answer questions about recent incidents, though they require careful prompting to retrieve those memories. When these children grow to age six or eight, they demonstrate a greater ability to recall and describe significant incidents in their lives. In many cases, children develop well-established autobiographical memories comparable in scope to the normal forgetting evident in adults. Despite having these memories, children tend to be unable to recall events from the very earliest stages of their lives.

While recent years have seen increased research into childhood amnesia, the precise reason for its occurrence remains a mystery (Vitelli, 2014). Over the past century, numerous studies have examined the earliest age at which adults can remember a life event, and the findings have been remarkably consistent.

How Childhood Amnesia Is Tested

There are various ways in which childhood amnesia is tested as part of efforts to understand the condition and why it occurs. One of the most commonly used methods is asking adults to recall their earliest memory. In this case, investigators ask adults to remember various memories from early childhood or specific target events that took place in their early life. The second most commonly used method for testing infantile amnesia is the cue word technique, developed by Sir Francis Galton. This method involves giving participants specific words and asking them to think of a particular memory linked to that word, then estimate their age when they first experienced that memory. The cue word technique is typically used to examine autobiographical memory across the entire lifespan.

Why Childhood Amnesia Occurs

As noted above, many studies have been conducted to understand childhood amnesia, yet the reason it occurs has remained elusive. Nonetheless, several explanations have been proposed. One of the most well-known is Freud's theory that childhood amnesia is caused by the suppression of traumatic memories during the early psychosexual development of the child. Many contemporary theorists have disagreed with this explanation, instead arguing that childhood amnesia is attributed to the early development of brain structures. Even though children and infants appear capable of retaining information for several weeks or months, connecting those memories to verbal cues is increasingly difficult to achieve (Vitelli, 2014).

According to psychologists, childhood amnesia occurs because the child's brain is still developing the capacity to encode long-term memories (Dean, 2014). This difficulty stems from the fact that the neural architecture required to encode long-term memories needs time to develop. Specifically, people need to encode information about the physical location of an event, develop self-awareness and self-understanding, and acquire an understanding of differences in perspective. Moreover, when a child is young, the hippocampus—an important brain structure for memory—is still undergoing neurogenesis, during which new neurons are continuously produced. These processes contribute to the clearing out of old memories in order to make way for new learning. Therefore, childhood amnesia occurs largely because of brain development processes that eliminate earlier memories.

Conclusion

Childhood amnesia, or infantile amnesia, is a common condition involving the scarcity or lack of autobiographical memories among adults for events that took place in early life. Various studies have been carried out to help understand the condition and why it occurs. Generally, the condition is attributed to brain development and related processes that contribute to the loss of older memories, particularly long-term memories. The topic is applicable to the field of psychology with regard to the encoding, storage, and retrieval of memory. It is also relevant to everyday life given that adults commonly have difficulty recalling memories of events from their early years.