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The Ins and Outs of Infant Memory
August 11, 2022
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
-Lao Tzu
-Lao Tzu
What is your earliest memory? For most of us, it won’t be anything before the age of three. However, scientists affirm what anyone spending time around infants knows: infants from a very young age do develop memories. It's just that memories come in different forms. Among the earliest and most significant memories are of our parents' faces. An article on The Conversation shares a clever research model by Rovee-Collier and colleagues who delved into a different kind of memory, noting, "at six months, if infants are trained for one minute [in an activity such as kicking their legs to move a mobile], they can remember an event a day later. The older infants were, the longer they remembered. She also found that you can get infants to remember events for longer by training them for longer periods of time, and by giving them reminders—for example, by showing them the mobile moving very briefly on its own."
What infants don't seem to remember into later years are 'autobiographical memories.' Researchers call this 'infantile amnesia' and suggest that remembering experiences in your life requires a sense of self which doesn't develop until later on, as the hippocampus develops more fully. This, combined with developing the language needed for narratives, may be the key to developing memories that stick.
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Comments (2)
Displaying All 2 CommentsExchange Press
Eugene, OR, United States
I so appreciate what you've said here, Ursula. I'm so grateful for your impact on children and families!
Beauvoir
Washington, DC, United States
Articles such as this inspire and encourage me! FROM TEACHING TO THINKING is a beautiful homage to the connections children create. They thrive in relationship and interaction with their peers, with adults, with ideas, with objects, and with real and imaginary events of intercommunicating worlds. Excellent programs put into practice the fundamental aspects of the work of Dewey, Piaget, and Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, Loris Malaguzzi, and others. This structure invites collaboration among children, teachers, and parents.
At the heart of strong early childhood programs (and good parenting) are powerful images of children. Observant adults regard children as full of potential, competent and capable of building their own theories. Teachers and parents as collaborators recognize the right of children to realize and expand their potential, placing immense value on their ability to socialize, and to satisfy their need and desire to learn. Children are reassured and emboldened by an effective alliance between the adults in their lives, those who are always ready to help, who place higher value on the search for constructive strategies of thought and action than on the direct transmission of knowledge and skills. These constructive strategies contribute the formation of creative intelligence, free thought, and individuality that is sensitive and aware, through an ongoing process of differentiation and integration with other people and other experiences. The fact that rights of children are recognized as the rights of all children is the sign of a more accomplished humanity.
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