Earliest memories can start from the age of two-and-a-half
On average the earliest memories that people can recall point back to when they were just two-and-a-half years old, a new study suggests.
The findings, published in peer-reviewed journal Memory, pushes back the previous conclusions of the average age of earliest memories by a whole year.
They are presented in a new 21-year study, which followed on from a review of already-existing data.
“When one’s earliest memory occurs, it is a moving target rather than being a single static memory,” explains childhood amnesia expert and lead author Dr. Carole Peterson, from Memorial University of Newfoundland.
“Thus, what many people provide when asked for their earliest memory is not a boundary or watershed beginning, before which there are no memories. Rather, there seems to be a pool of potential memories from which both adults and children sample.
“And, we believe people remember a lot from age two that they don’t realize they do.
“That’s for two reasons. First, it’s very easy to get people to remember earlier memories simply by asking them what their earliest memory is, and then asking them for a few more. Then they start recalling even earlier memories—sometimes up to a full year earlier. It’s like priming a pump; once you get them started its self-prompting.
“Secondly, we’ve documented those early memories are systematically misdated. Over and over again we find people think they were older than they actually were in their early memories.”
For more than 20 years Dr. Peterson has conducted studies on memory, with a particular focus on the ability of children and adults to recall their earliest years.
This latest research reviewed 10 of her research articles on childhood amnesia followed by analyses of both published and unpublished data collected in Dr. Peterson’s laboratory since 1999. It featured a total of 992 participants, and memories of 697 participants were then compared to the recollections of their parents.
Overall, it shows that children’s earliest memories come before when they think it happened, as confirmed by their parents.
Source: DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2021.1918174 https://taylorandfrancis.com/
Earliest memories can start from the age of two-and-a-half
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