Why early childhood memories fade as we grow

The research, published on Wednesday in the journal, ‘Child Development,’ could provide psychologists with a better understanding of the process of how people form life stories that help us in understanding ourselves.

Memories become permanent after the age of 10
Lead author of the study Carole Peterson said, “These are the memories we use to develop a sense of identity – who we are and where we come from.” Peterson is a psychology professor at the University Newfoundland in Canada.

Most adults are not able to recall their earliest memories before school going age and the experts have been aware of this phenomenon, called ‘infantile amnesia’ for decades.

It has been studied among the adults, but the new study suggests that the process of forgetting earliest memories occurs slowly in childhood itself.

The author of the study found that in case of traumatic experiences, children remember them very intensely even if they have happened at a very young age.

For instance, children as young as 7 or 8 years remembered if they have undergone some extraordinary event even five years back.

Findings corroborate earlier study results
During her earlier study which was published in 2005, Peterson has found that younger children clearly remembered earlier first memories as compared to the children who were older.

During that study, children aged 6 to 9 had memories going back to the age of three years on an average. But children aged 14 to 16 remembered the events which took place at the age of four or more on average.

In the present study, Peterson, along with her team re-interviewed 140 children after a gap of two years. They were asked to recall their three earliest memories as was done in the earlier study.

The researchers found that only 5 children whose age was between 4 and 7 at the time of the earlier interview, out of the 50 youngest children at the present interview, could recall the memories which they told during the previous interview.

They could not recall even when the researchers tried to remind them of their previous answers.

Peterson said, “The memories were just gone.”

But 22 out of the 61 children from the oldest groups, 1 –11 and 12–13 remembered the same first memories.

The researchers found that whereas 39 percent of the memories were lost in the children between the age of 4 to 5 years, it was 24 percent of the memories for the 6 to 7 years old. Children above the age of ten remembered almost everything.

The subject of the study is of interest to the neuroscientists who are studying the working of human brain.