Canadian study suggests children forget early memories as they grow older

Researchers from the University of Newfoundland have revealed children can vividly recall memories from as early as 18-months-old, but lose such memories somewhere down the road of maturation.

The study asked a slate of 100 children from ages four to 13 to recall their earliest memories, including when they believed such memories occurred.

The results showed children could recall memories from well before their second birthday, with their parents able to confirm many of the events and the dates they took place.

The experts spoke with the very same children just two years later, asking them to once again recall those memories they had previously documented. But the results were far less vivid this time around.

The children surveyed were unable to recall the memories they had spoken of only two years earlier. In fact, they were unable to remember those documented memories even when prompted with hints.

"What surprised us is that we would give these really detailed cues to the children about memories they had told us about two years previously and they would say 'No, that never happened to me'," said lead author Carole Peterson in a BBC story.

Many, if not most adults, cannot remember much before the age of three or four.

Patricia Bauer of Emory University suggests people may encode memories from the early years in a different way than we do older ones, potentially explaining why the surveyed children had forgotten those detailed memories in only two years.

Nora Newcombe, a psychologist at Temple University, shares a different belief, explaining episodic memory may not be a direct focus of a young child learning the ways of the world.

"I think the primary goal of the first two years is to acquire semantic knowledge and from that point of view, episodic memory might actually be a distraction," Newcombe said in a LifesLittleMysteries.com story.

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