[00:00.00]Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a psychology class.
[00:07.10]FEMALE PROFESSOR: Ok, if I asked about the earliest thing you can remember, I’ll bet for most of you, your earliest memory would be from about age 3, right? [00:17.50]Well, that’s true for most adults… [00:20.11]we can’t remember anything that happened before the age of 3. [00:23.77]An-and this phenomenon is so widespread and well-documented. [00:27.74]it has a name. [00:28.79]It’s called childhood amnesia and was first documented in 1893.
[00:35.23]As I said this phenomenon refers to adults not being able to remember childhood incidents. [00:44.62]It’s not children trying to remember events from last month or last year. [00:50.63]Of course it follows that if you can’t remember an incident as a child you probably won’t remember it as an adult…[00:58.53]OK. So–so–so why is this? [01:01.91]What are the reasons for childhood amnesia…
[01:05.31]Well, once a popular explanation was that childhood memories are repressed… um, the memories are disturbing, so that as adults we keep them buried. [01:16.57]And so we can’t recall them… and this is based on… well—well it’s not based on–on–on the the kind of solid research and lab testing I want to talk about today, [01:27.33]so—so let’s put that explanation aside and concentrate on just two. OK.
[01:35.16]It—it could be that as children we do form memories of things prior to age 3, but forget them as we grow older. [01:43.13]That’s one explanation. [01:45.48]Another possibility is that children younger than 3 lack, um, lack some cognitive capacity for memory. [01:53.48]And that idea… um, that children are unable to form memories, um… that’s been the dominant belief in psychology for the past hundred years.
[02:03.82]And this idea is very much tied to two things: the theories of Jean Piaget and also to language development in children. [02:14.41]So… Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. Piaget suggested that because they don’t have language, children younger than 18-24 months live in the “here and now,” [02:31.09]that is, they lack the means to symbolically represent objects and events that are not physically present. [02:39.17]Everybody get that? [02:40.37]Piaget proposed that young children don’t have a way to represent things that aren’t right in front of them. [02:50.03]That’s what language does, right? [02:52.85]Words represent things, ideas.
[02:56.35]Once language starts to develop, from about age 2, they do have a system for symbolic representation and can talk about things which aren’t in their immediate environment, in—including the past. [03:11.30]Of course, he didn’t claim that infants don’t have any sort of memory – uh, it’s acknowledged that they can recognize some stimuli, like faces. [03:20.75]And for many years, this model was very much in favor in psychology even though memory tests were never performed on young children.
[03:31.68]Well, finally, in the 1980s, a study was done. [03:39.72]And this study showed that very young children – under the age of two - do have the capacity for recall. [03:47.40]Now, if the children can’t talk, how was recall tested? [03:52.12]Well, that’s a good question, since the capacity for recall has always been linked with the ability to talk.
[03:59.54]So the researchers set up an experiment using imitation based tasks. [04:05.92]Adults used props, um, toys or other objects, to demonstrate an action that had two steps. [04:13.13]The children were asked to imitate the steps immediately, and then again after delays of 1 or more months. And, even after a delay, the children could-could recall, or replicate the action - the objects used, the steps involved and the order of the steps. Even children as young as 9 months!
[04:36.90]Now, tests showed that there was a faster rate of forgetting among the youngest children… but most importantly, it showed that the development of recall did not depend on language development. [04:51.58]And that was an important finding. [04:55.08]I guess I should add that the findings don’t say that there was no connection, um no connection between the development of language and memory. [05:04.35]There’s some evidence that being able to talk about an event does lead to having a stronger memory of that event. [05:12.09]But that doesn’t seem to be the real issue here…
[05:15.22]So, back to our question about the cause of childhood amnesia. [05:20.03]Well, there is something called the “rate of forgetting.” [05:25.88]And childhood amnesia may reflect a high rate of forgetting. In other words, children under the age of 3 do form memories, and do so without language. [05:38.57]But they forget the memories at a fast rate, probably faster than adults do. [05:44.63]Researchers have set a standard… sort of an expected rate of forgetting. But that expected rate was set based on tests done on adults. [05:56.13]So what is the rate of forgetting for children under the age of three? [06:00.46]We expect it to be high but the tests to prove this really haven’t been done yet.
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