Last week, my sister’s family came for a visit. She has two children, Elise, 5, and Maggie, 3. All of us had a wonderful time, but after they left, I began to wonder how much of it they would remember.
I figure that Elise will have pretty good recall of the trip, but that Maggie will probably forget most, if not all, of it. I’m basing this conclusion on the rough truism that most people don’t have memories earlier than about age 4.
But this doesn’t make much sense. It is not as if children have no long-term memory - I hadn’t seen Maggie in about 4 months, but she certainly knew who I was. Or did she? Was it just that she knew she had an Uncle Vince, and that she was going to visit Uncle Vince, and when she got here she unconciously put 2 and 2 together?
But in any event, it seems almost as if there is a break in memory storage at some point. Maggie (and Elise when she was younger), can regale me at great length about something that happened two weeks or two months before, but in a few years they will have no memory of that event. What happens?
I heard that it was age 2. But definitely people have memories earlier than age 4. The hippocampus is the primary organ for memories. Long-term memory is conditioned upon permanent changes. Short-term memory is produced by changes which are transitory. The hippocampus is fully developed, IMHO, by age 2.
SuaSponte, are you talking about permanent memories? I doubt there is any way to predict accurately. I remember only two people that I knew only before the age of six.
I was surprised to learn that my husband’s grandchildren (ages 11 and 13) cannot remember my not being part of their lives (before ages 4 and 5.) Yet, the 13 year old remembers our first day together – perhaps because of the acorns that she gathered that day that have remained in plain sight.)
barbitu8, I truly believe you because my memory goes back to the age of 25 months. Can you recommend any website reading on long term memory and short term memory?
My sister and I both have phenominal long term memory and terrible problems with short term memory. My short term memory is so bad that I don’t remember entire movies that I saw only three months ago. I think it is a combination of a problem with seratonin and the medication that I take for that problem. I’m also much older than the average Doper.
My first memory was of V-J Day. I remember what I was thinking inside my head. There were no photographs of the occasion, but my mother saved some of the unlit firecrackers in her junk drawer for the next twenty or so years and that may have kept the memory ever green. I also have two other memories from age two years and six months. Who knows what else I can remember from that age and am just unable to place a date on it.
No cites … but I think the problem difficulty is that people may have memories from quite early - maybe 2 years old - but memory is massively reworked and reinterpreted as they age, so early memories are highly unreliable.
I don’t think this is quite right, for two reasons.
First, the time period in which a memory becomes “long-term memory” is short (it’s been a long time since Experimental Psych, but IIRC, it is a matter of hours or days). So even kids at ages less than 2 have long-term memory - for example, they recognize grandma, even if they haven’t seen grandma in a week.
Second while people certainly have memories earlier than age 4, they tend to be memories of extraordinary events, like Zoe and V-J Day. (My early memories are the first day of nursery school and my grandmother’s funeral). OTOH, while I don’t remember every minute of my life at age 5, I certainly have mundane memories - I basically recall the normal pattern of my life at that age, which is equivalent to my recall of life at age 15, 20, 25, etc.
That is the question I am wondering about - why is long-term recall of events at, say age 2, only sporadic (and generally of extraordinary events), even though children of that age do possess long-term memory? IOW, memories get into a child’s long-term memory, but at some point they get purged. Why and how?
Zoe, permanent memories is exactly what I am talking about.
raygirvan, the problem isn’t that most of us have unreliable memories from early childhood, but that we don’t have any, except for extraordinary events.
I’m always amazed when people bring this up. My memory is very, very average. By no means photograpgic. I’m also extremely vague. I’m forever forgetting my keys, etc. Now early childhhood, on the other hand…
We moved from suburban Sydney to a country area when I was four years and three months, so I have a good point of reference for this.
My memories of living in Sydney at that time would number at least in the hundreds, and possibly in the thousands. I could draw you a detailed floor plan of the house, complete with furniture placement. Trips into the city with my mum, going to preschool, visiting relatives, etc.
I’ll give an example of the level of detail:
My mother was a commercial artist, and used to draw fashion sketches for a local department store. I remember catching the train with her from Croydon Station, and wondering at Platform One, which was disused and overgrown with weeds. When the train pulled in, I used to like to look at the coat of arms on the side of the carriages, because they had a kangaroo and emu on them. I remember many trackside details of the ten minute train journey, and going to the advertising department of the department store, and looking at a fishtank they had there. The lift had a driver whose name was Stan. He was very old, and very friendly. On the return train journey, we’d either catch an “all stations” train back to Croydon, or a “Through” to Burwood, and then we’d pick up a taxi at the rank. I recall marvelling at the taxi radio, and wondering how it could be that there was no cable trailing out the back of the cab (obviously not a child of the TV remote age). If we went to Croydon, I’d get a jam tart at the cake shop, then we’d catch the bus home. I used to dislike my child’s ticket because it had a boring ol’ blue stripe on it, and not a cool purple X like my mum’s adult ticket did.
Now, as I said, my memory is not exceptional. I suspect that a lot of people who think they have no memories from when they were younger than four or five probably do indeed have them, but date them as more recent. The fact that I moved house at 4 years and 3 months is convenient in providing a reference point which some people may not have (I remember the move too!).
I have also heard that the mind compresses time above twenty five years, so that memories older than that all feel like “about twenty five years ago”, regardless of their actual age. This means that memories from older childhood or adulthood greater than 25 years would still be correctly dated by other references (“I was in fifth grade”, or “Saigon had just fallen, and it was all over the news”), but deciding whether you were three or six when something happened might not be so easy.
Two-year-olds have memories like elephants. No kidding.
Visiting a two-year-old cousin after an absence of six months, I asked her if she remembered me. She seemed rather indignant when saying she did. In fact, she was able to recall our last visit in detail.
The problem is that while small children can have quite effective memories at the time, access to these memories becomes lost as the years pass.
The question of unreliable memories is an extremely interesting subject in itself.
Judging from conversations with friends, it seems it is very common for people to have extremely vivid memories of things which happened in early childhood which, in later life, they know rationally could never have happened. A friend of mine, now in his late 40s, recalls distinctly the time as a preschooler that his mother explained to him that the television schedule was repeating itself exactly from yesterday because this week had two Saturdays in it. Another friend remembers the time the handpuppet came up from under the bed as he was trying to fall asleep. I remember the evening around Christmas when I was about four (that would have been 1960) when an all-black choir passed through our all-white neighborhood singing spirituals. I’m guessing that these are all recollections of dreams.
Yep: that really is the problem. I have a childhood memory of visiting a place where we went down a tunnel from a zoo to come out on a beach. Years later, I found the zoo was in Bristol, but the beach was maybe 100 miles away in the Isle of Wight.
From a web search: "* Research shows that all memory is subject to the ordinary processes of misperception, distortion, decay, and change. The scientific evidence is clear: memories of events, whether traumatic or not, are reconstructed (that is, continuously reworked over time). As a result, all recollections are subject to change as time passes.*
Childhood memory, whatever people may claim, is extremely unreliable.