Most adults can’t remember much from before the age of three or four, but three and four year-olds clearly can. A recent Canadian study confirms this:
Experts from the Memorial University of Newfoundland asked 100 children aged 4 to 13 to recall three of their earliest memories and when they thought they had happened.
They found that the younger children could recall memories from as early as 18 months.
They also checked with their parents, who could corroborate many of the events and the times they took place.
Two years later, they spoke to the same children and again asked them to recall three of their earliest memories.
What they found was that the younger children in the survey recalled different memories from those they had given before. Nor did they recall their earlier memories when presented with prompts.
A commenter at Boing Boing brings up a point I’ve pondered:
Like a lot of modern families (I think) we have digital cameras and use them with abandon taking pics and vid of far more life events and mundanity then my family ever did. My kids love to look at the pics and videos often and as we do we dialogue about the events that were happening then, etc.
I can’t help but think that all of this review is going to embed the memories deeper into their conscious and subconscious resulting in these ones have much more clarity and quantity of early memories.
Memories of photos are memories of photos. If there ever was a memory of the event it will be written-over by the photo.
The modern era is characterized by the memory hole — the displacement of the past by today’s interpretation of the past — not by technologically enhanced actual memories.
It is too easy by half to compare our memory to a computer and a hard drive. The process of memory is just that, a process — influenced by a wide range of feelings, speculations and presuppositions. So we shouldn’t be surprised to find out that memories at any age are mutable. It is an illusion that they are any more than a fraction of what the “truth” is (at least how American culture wants to define truth). A quick read on this is The Invisible Gorilla, by Chabis and Simons.