Remembering Early Childhood: How Much, How, and Why (or Why Not)

In this article, we consider recent research on three questions about people's memories for their early childhood: whether childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, whether implicit memories survive when explicit memories do not, and why early episodic memories are sketchy. The research leads us to form three conclusions. First, we argue that childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, as long as the term is defined clearly. Specifically, people are able to recall parts of their lives from the period between ages 2 and 5 years, but they recall less from that period than from other periods. Second, we conclude that implicit memories from early childhood may be evident even when explicit memories are not, a finding that suggests early experience may affect behavior in ways that people do not consciously recognize. Third, we argue that although young children are well known to be wonderfully efficient learners of semantic information, they have difficulty in either encoding or retrieving the interlinked aspects of events that lend them their autobiographical character. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories of early childhood may be linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex.     

Promoting the Transition from Implicit to Explicit Understanding: A Training Study of False Belief

Ninety‐one children aged between 2;10 and 5;0 participated in a training study of false belief. Children were assigned to either an explanation condition, a practice condition or a control condition where children heard two stories unrelated to false belief. Children’s eye movements in anticipation of the protagonist reappearing were monitored at pre‐test. Only the explanation condition led to improvements in judgement and justification of a protagonist’s future action based on false belief. Children who looked in anticipation to where the protagonist thought the object was at pre‐test were more likely to give a correct judgement at post‐test than those who did not. Those children in the explanation group who gave a correct judgement at pre‐test were more likely to give an appropriate justification at post‐test than those who did not. Three main conclusions are drawn: (1) providing explanation about the underlying principles of a task is more likely to lead to improvements in performance than merely informing children of whether their response is correct; (2) the nature of improvements in performance will depend on the level of knowledge of the child at pre‐test; (3) training will only be beneficial for those children who demonstrate evidence of implicit understanding.     

Directed Forgetting: Short-term Memory or Conditioned Response?

The Psychological Record - Previous researchers have interpreted the phenomenon of directed forgetting in terms of animal short-term memory and rehearsal. An alternative explanation-that directed...