Infantile amnesia

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In psychology, infantile amnesia describes the phenomenon that most adults cannot remember events that occurred before the age of three.

Possible reasons

There are different assumptions for this phenomenon depending on the underlying theory:

  • Psychoanalysis : Sigmund Freud related this process to repression . This assumption is now considered refuted, u. a. because not only negative memories but all memories are forgotten.
  • Brain maturation : The brain structures necessary for conscious memory are not yet fully developed at birth (Schachter, Moscovitch, 1984). These include subcortical limbic-diencephalic structures that are not fully developed until the age of 2 to 3 years (controversial) and neocortical areas (e.g. in the inferotemporal cortex) (McKeeund, Squire, 1993)
  • Encoding : Early memories are only encoded as actions or sensations. They can no longer be called up later because they were saved in a different format than later memories (mainly verbal) (Howe, Courage, 1993)
  • From around the age of 2, the toddler develops an independent personality (it recognizes itself in the mirror). From this point on, his experiences are saved as personal ICH experiences (I, my hand, my mom ...). When the self-awareness is fully developed, one no longer consciously remembers previous experiences that are not ICH-coded (since these are stored in the memory without the ICH-code). (Kinseher, 2008)
  • Development status of the knowledge structures (Fivush, Hammond, 1990): According to this assumption, infantile amnesia is based on the lack of distinctive retrieval stimuli and on the fact that small children first have to acquire framework structures in order to recount events and to record them in their memory. This way young children focus on the similarities between events, but this is poorly suited for easy retrieval later. In addition, they do not yet have their own frame structures to construct memories. Because of this, these early memories are fragmented, making them difficult to retrieve later. Infantile amnesia is thus due to the effort to form scripts and to forget about out of the ordinary events.

literature

  • Schachter, M. Moscovitch: Infants, amnesia and dissociable memory systems. In: M. Moscovitch (Ed.): Infant Memory. Plenum, New York 1984, pp. 173-216.
  • ML Howe, ML Courage: On resolving the enigma of infantile amnesia. In: Psychological Bulletin. No. 113, 1993, pp. 305-326.
  • R. Fivush, N. Hamond: Autobiographical memory across the preschool years: Towards reconceptualizing childhood amnesia. In: R. Fivush, JA Hudson (Eds.): Knowing and remembering in young children. Cambridge University Press, New York 1990, pp. 223-248.
  • Richard Kinseher: Hidden Roots of Happiness - Self-Observable Brain Function. BoD, Norderstedt 2008, ISBN 978-3-8334-7378-4 .
  • Patricia J. Bauer, Marina Larkina: The onset of childhood amnesia in childhood: A prospective investigation of the course and determinants of forgetting of early-life events. In: Memory. Online publication of November 18, 2013, doi: 10.1080 / 09658211.2013.854806 .