The Report on Early Childhood Amnesia

This report will explore how childhood amnesia affects a persons memory in regards to early childhood memories as well as how this can affect how people pull memories from early childhood, childhood amnesia is the term used to describe the period from which adults cannot recall personal memories,for years ( Mosby’s medical dictionary, 2019) Psychologists have tried to determine what the earliest stage a person can reliably recall childhood memories this is called the age of offset childhood amnesia. This varie from person to person, finally i twill look at how this can affect a person who reports abuse as a child and how reliable this is.

At the age of two years old children are able to answer questions about recent events however they need careful prompting to retrieve memories (Romeo Vitelli, 2018). Over the next four or five years children get increaslingy better at recalling and describing important life events for example a move or a death in the family by the age of seven or eight most children have well-developed autobiographical memories with the same rate of normal forgetting seen in adults. (Usher, J & Neisser, U, 1993). When questioned about earlier memories however, children are rarely able to recall memories of events that happened earlier than age three or four and these early memories become even harder to access as they grow older. Despite decades of research, understanding why this childhood amnesia happens remains a mystery. (Hartshorn, K, Rovee-Collier, C, 2003). Although children can be prompted to recall early childhood memories, this is often plagued by problems with false memories that are cause by leading questions and cuing unintenionaly on the part of adults, For this reason, the American Psychiatric Association has cautioned against cases of adults recalling events of abuse that apparently occurred at a very early age without physical evidence.(Mullen, 1994).

For adults however, recall of memories before the age of three or four is virtually impossible regardless of the method used to retrieve those memories, whether through free recall or by targeted recall (such as the birth of a sibling). Over the past century, research into the earliest age for which adults can recall a life event has been remarkably stable. Those memories typically begin at about age three or four with number and quality of memories available gradually increasing over time. The most widely used method for testing childhood amnesia is the cue word technique. First developed by Sir Francis Galton in his early research on memory, the technique involves giving participants certain words (eg.,dog, cat, or chair) and then asking them to 'think of a specific memory' associated with that word as well as estimating their age at the time when they experienced that memory. Cue word methods are often used to test autobiographical memory across the entire lifespan.