The latest study found that children can remember memories from their earliest years, but forget most of them later. A Canadian study suggest that events from well before the age of two can be recalled. The experts from the Memorial University of Newfoundland asked one hundred children aged four to thirteen to recall three of their earliest memories.
It was found that younger kids could recall memories from as early as eighteen months. The parents conformed that the incidents occurred and given their own estimation of the age of their children at the time of memories. Two years later, experts asked the same children to recall three of their earliest memories.
Two years later, they spoke to the same children and again asked them to recall three of their earliest memories. The younger kids in the survey recalled different memories from those they had given before. Nor did they recall their earlier memories when offered with prompts.
It was found that kids between ages four and seven at the first interview showed very small overlap between memories they recalled for the first time and those they remembered two years after. It also suggested that very few memories of young kids are flimsy and susceptible to forgetting.
In comparison to a third of the ten to thirteen years old illustrated the similar memory as their very earliest when asked two years apart and more than half of all the memories they provided were the same at both interviews.
According to Carole Peterson, study author from Memorial University of Newfoundland, the earliest memories younger children seemed to change, with memories from younger ages being replaced by memories from older ages. But older children became more consistent in their memories as they grew older. Therefore the psychological childhood begins much latter than real childhood.
He added most of those events that previously were talked about, that caused laughter or tears, are no longer accessible if they occurred in preschool years. The study was published in the journal Child Development.