Why are kids so damn good at memory matching games?

[DSeid]

My 8 year old daughter routinely beats my pants off at memory matching games. So did my other older kids when they were young but they lost the ability to be so good as they got older. It seems to me that this is a general pattern and I wonder why.

Googling gives me only this, and honestly that is not a satisfactory answer.

Children have the edge, no doubt, because they lack an adult’s competing mental clutter. … Visual input is held wide open because only through life experiences can a sense of relevance for what should be held in memory is gained. Research professor Steven Rose further explains in his book, The Making of Memory, that the human race evolved in situations where “it was a good bet that the environment in which one grew up would be virtually identical to that in which one spent one’s entire adult life. Hence the eidetic memory of childhood, enabling rules of perception to be developed, could smoothly transpose at the approach of puberty into the more linear forms of adult memory.”

Studies have concluded that up to half of young children have vivid eidetic memory. Many have it to such a strong degree that, with no prior instruction, they can count the stripes on the Cheshire cat’s tail well after being shown an illustration from Alice in Wonderland or spell out words in a foreign language they don’t know after seeing them a complex photograph. The rare few who retain it as adults generally live confused, unhappy lives with failed relationships. One eidetic man could clearly remember every face, but failed to recognize people in social situations because his precise mind imprinted frontal views, oblique views, and profiles as separate memories.

I am guessing that it does indeed have to do with the tactic we develop for using other sorts of maps for organizing as we get older - perhaps related to how taxicab drivers can hold amazing amounts of information about locations but at other costs.

The prodigious geographical knowledge of the average cabbie is, indeed, savant-like. But Dr Maguire recently found that it comes at a cost. Cabbies, on average, are worse than random control subjects and—horror—also worse than bus drivers, at memory tests such as word-pairing. Surprisingly, that is also true of their general spatial memory. Nothing comes for nothing, it seems, and genius has its price.

Surely there is some research on this that I have not found!

[MrTuffPaws]

They haven’t done enough drugs yet.

[Captain_Awesome]

IIRC in basic terms, it’s because as we develop our brains becomes more focused and adept in other, more complex tasks, and don’t maintain their ability for simple perception and recognition tasks. ‘Eidetic memory’ isn’t just confined to young children, animals such as chimpanzees could also likely beat you at memory capability for numerical recollection (link).

[Covered_In_Bees]

It’s also likely a symptom of you not keeping your memory up for such activities. Don’t work your brain in certain forms of thinking and it’s ability to do so will fade.

[DSeid]

Well trying to research my own answer, I’ve at least found that it is indeed true that

the youngest age groups showed the highest frequency of eidetic imagery, and beyond age 7, the incidence did not vary systematically.

So something does change as we grow into school age.

I appreciate the chimp link. It supports my speculation that it has to do with the ascendence of verbal cues and abstract mappings taking over memory functions from pure eidetic imagery. Thus we as we gain mastery of using rules and gestalts to remember we lose the ability to remember without context, rules, and gestalts as well. Like the article said about the cabbies: nothing comes for nothing, it seems.

I think that such speculation will be as close to a GQ answer as it gets, unless someone has some research to point me to.

[DSeid]

Interestingly semantic and explicit memory depend primarily on the hippocampus, which

is present at birth but is very immature until about age 5 or 6

In general the hippocampus is thought of as part of the “what” processing stream - as opposed to the “where” stream. I’m not sure of what to amke of that though. And if it has anything to do with another odd bit - why we forget so much of our early childhood.

[Category5]

Cause she doesn’t have your 40 years of memories clogging up the DNA database? Empty your trash, clear your cache, reset your cookies!