The generalities and specifics of long-term memory in infants and young children

Abstract

How is memory in the first three years of life related to memory in the older child or adult? This is a classic question raised originally by the phenomenon termed infantile amnesia by Freud and later Freudians. Adults and older children do not usually remember incidents from their lives that happen prior to the age of three. For most people the number of memories increases after the age of three and by the school years (seven or eight) becomes a flood of remembered episodes forming an autobiographical history.This phenomenon has given rise to much speculation and theorizing, but little empirical research. The basic question is whether the lack of early memories implies that the memory system itself is different in the early years or whether other factors, such as changes in cognitive organization (or repression, as Freud, 1924, theorized) are responsible for the effect.

Memory and Temporal Perspective: The Role of Temporal Frameworks in Memory Development

“…A considerable body of research has shown that children acquire scriptknowledge at a very early age and extract scripts after even a small number of experiences of an event sequence (e.g., Fivush, 1984;Hudson & Nelson, 1986;Nelson, 1986;Nelson & Hudson, 1988;Nelson & Ross, 1980). This may suggest that scripts are good candidates for developmentally early nonperspectival representational frameworks.…”

Memory development between 2 and 20

“…Bühler (1930) pointed out that 2-year-olds sometimes remernher even infrequent events for a long period of time. There are sirnilar reports in more reeent sturlies (e.g., Nelson & Ross, 1980;Todd & Perlmutter, 1980).…”

“…Older subjects were better able to recall objects with changing positions. Nelson and Ross (1980) also used the diary method and determined that toddlers (who had just turned two) employed more intentional memory activities for recall of events than for the location of meaningful objects. The older children were able to recall both objects and events accurately after a relatively long period of time (i.e., up to three months).…”

“…Although these diary studies provide valuable information about infants, there are methodological problems with them. Mothers' motivations and/or subjective interpretations cannot be evaluated reliably (Nelson & Ross, 1980). In contrast, reliability of measurement is no problern when memory for location is studied with hideand-seek tasks, Situations that permit examination of a naturalistic behavior in a controlled setting.…”

On the development of episodic memory: Two basic questions

“…Groundbreaking work conducted by Katherine Nelson and colleagues (Nelson, 1986;Nelson & Gruendel, 1981;Nelson & Ross, 1980) markedly changed this perspective. When asking children to report what usually happens in familiar events such as going to McDonald´s, grocery shopping, or having a birthday party, they found that children as young as three years of age indeed were able to provide accounts of script-like events following a certain structure and order (Nelson, 1986;Nelson & Gruendel, 1981).…”