/ Maggie Koerth-Baker / 7:25 am Wed May 11, 2011

Little kids and memory

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Most adults don't have any memories from before they were age 3 or 4. That's certainly true for me. My earliest memories that I can accurately place in time come from when I was 3, just before Return of the Jedi came out. I'm pretty sure that my earliest memory is watching the Death Star explode on TV, followed closely by memories of a vicious preschool playground debate over whether or not Darth Vader was actually Luke's father. (I got that one wrong. I totally thought he was lying.)

But a Canadian study suggests that this limit to how far back grown ups can remember doesn't apply to kids. A group of 100 children, between the ages of 4 and 13, were asked to describe their earliest memories. After verifying events with parents, researchers found that the youngest kids could recall things that happened when they were as young as 18 months old.

But, when the same kids were brought back two years later, those memories had faded. Their earliest memories were now different, later events. And the kids couldn't recall their previous early memories even with prompting. The researchers are speculating that our brains may encode memories in different ways during the first few years of life than they do later on.

BBC: Children can recall early memories, Canadian study suggests

Via Mark Changizi

Image: Unpacking My Brain, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0)

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  1. The researchers are speculating that our brains may encode memories in different ways during the first few years of life than they do later on.

    You mean like, before language acquisition vs. after?

  2. I have an early Return of the Jedi-related memory as well. I would have just turned four a month or so earlier. My aunt took me to see the movie, and before the show, we went to K-Mart and she bought me a Gamorrean guard figure. I lost his axe at the theater.

  3. I (truthfully) have one memory from when I was between 1.5 to 2 years old. I was in my grandfather’s house and remember him talking to me. I could not have been more than two years old because he died the year I turned two. I have another memory that is between 2 and 3 years old, and another between 2 and 3 when I was still in a crib (unless my parents kept me in a crib until I was 5…). Other than those three memories the next one I remember is from when I turned 4 years old.

  5. Interesting. By the way, this is not quite true to me. I remember some stuff (small scenes, mostly) from before my brother was born, and we are 2 years 9 months apart. My mother says those really happened, so I guess the memories are genuine. I read somewhere that language development plays a role, and my parents say I had a big vocabulary from an early age (no wonder I make a living writing now), so maybe that plays a role? Not that I’m an expert at this, quite the opposite.

  6. I also remember things from when I was quite young, the earliest verified memory was when I was around 12 months, but it could be as late as 2 years. (My mother’s memory is no where near as good as mine).

    I also clearly remember kindergarten (on a daily basis, even), field trips, potty-training, learning to swing on a swingset, and many, many more young memories.

    I’m 27 now, and these memories haven’t faded or changed so far as I can tell (journals show the same level of detail). Unfortunately for me, I can’t seem to remember small details of daily life now, where I put my keys, number strings I heard 5 minutes ago, etc.

  7. This is certainly true of my own kids. They can clearly recall events from when they were around 12 mos old. But then, I think kids under two also produce phonemes from the language they spoke in their previous life. Until they forget them and learn their ‘new’ language. So maybe it’s just me . . . YMMV.

  8. the Words episode of Radio Lab talks about a theory that language acquisition changes how our memory works, and before the age of 4, kids are speaking, but not really internalizing the speech, (perhaps that’s why they’re such chatter boxes, they need to hear themselves to think) and once speech is internalized, the brain is really rewired and doesn’t have access to memories formed before.

  9. Interesting.

    My earliest memory is of my second birthday (identified by my mother). In the memory, I’m running through the living room and kitchen of our house at the time, joyously honking the tricycle horn that my uncle gave me.

    Interestingly, I have an implicit memory of the layout of the rest of that house, although no visual memories. That is, I know where the hallway, bedrooms, and bathroom were, but I don’t remember what they looked like.

    I have a few memories from ages 3 and 4 — brief, isolated, but vivid scenes. The number of memories explodes around age 5, and I can connect them up and put them into context, rather than just recalling isolated vignettes. Clearly something changed around age 5 in the way my brain stores and accesses memories.

    chgoliz, I thought about language acquisition. But I could talk before that second-birthday memory, and I learned to read by the time I turned 4. So it’s not just language.

    1. Caroline,

      See jrishel’s post right above you (#5). Being able to say a few words is not the same thing as using the sound symbols of language to order your thoughts.

      1. chgoliz, that post must have been made while I was writing mine. Hmm — that’s an interesting point. Probably explains the disconnected but vivid nature of my earlier memories — lack of internalized language = lack of abstractions, so they’re very immediate, concrete memories. It’s true that I remember having verbal thoughts in later memories, and not in the few early ones — I remember other people speaking, but just emotions in myself.

        Toff, that’s certainly true. It’s easy to manufacture memories in both children and adults by telling them something happened; imagination fills in the gaps. If the memory is of an event with lots of photos and video of it, and/or an event often told as a story, it’s probably questionable. It may be real, but it’s hard to tell.

  10. I have two memories that must be very early.

    Lying in a cot, with a picture on the footboard of some cute animals on a lilypad.

    I have no idea how I would have understood animals or lilypads at an age when I would still have been in a cot (which I’m told wasn’t long because I started climbing out at a very early age), so maybe that one is not real.

    The other is pushing a matchbox car along the edge of kitchen benches. I remember that I had to reach up a long way to do it, and that I could stand by using the bench as a support but not without it.

    Mum says I was walking and talking before 12 months, and reading simple newspaper articles at 3 or 4 — especially about the space program.

  11. I’m 27, my oldest memory is the food court of Harrod’s in London, I remember the mosaic tile. I was about 28months old. I’ve only been there once, and described it in detail to my mom not too long ago, she was blown away.

  12. I have some high chair memories. Network radio was big time and I recognized the recurring comedy show catch phrases from week to week. But some things about our house and my traumatic accidents I have no memory. Those early memories that I have I can’t really say why they’re still there.

  13. I’ve always found this odd. I was born in January, 1970 and I remember the end of the Vietnam war (The Nixon end, not the Ford end,) most all of the Watergate crisis, each apartment we lived in when I was 2, 3, and 4, my sister’s birth (just shy of my 3rd birthday) and a whole host of smaller, more personal events – watching Bonanza on a TV we didn’t have after age 4, a bee sting at age 3, a disastrous episode with some M&Ms, a paper towel tube incident that kept me off potato chips for 6 months, etc, etc, etc…

    Maybe I spent too much time living in my head as a child, so that these memories stayed fresh when other kids’ memories would have faded.

  14. I have some very distinct memories as early as two. Not a large number, but things I can link to dates. My parents collected sections for a large dictionary and a scientific encyclopedia that were given out by a local supermarket. I don’t remember the content, but the covers and inside covers because they were so interesting. Both were (probably imitation) tooled leather and both had inside covers in a crazy green paisley design.

    I also remember when my parents bought their first television set. What I later learned was the price is right had just started. I have the odd memory of seeing pro wrestling matches when the standard uniform was swim trunks and high boots.

    From around 3 on, I can remember all kinds of stuff that I placed by knowing the house we lived in and when we lived there.

    Just don’t ask me what I did yesterday or last week.

  15. I remember remembering. Does that make sense? I remember at the age of three, remembering what came before. Being carried up stairs, into a church for baptism.

    I remember lying in a crib, on my back. And when I was two or three, lying in bed before sleep, and seeing, like I was floating over them, textured surfaces. Years later, I saw aerial views of mountain ranges, and thought, “that reminds me of what I saw as a baby.”

    I am a skeptic, and don’t believe in supernatural stuff, so I’m not going to claim that I was a bird in a previous life or anything. But I remember what I’d see as an infant, as I was dozing off. What looked like rocky mountain ranges, seen from above. Probably something to do with the visual cortex still maturing, I don’t know.

  16. Memory’s a tricky thing. How could one be sure that an accurate memory is actually always a memory and not at least sometimes a reconstruction based on conversations, photos, videos?

    1. Agree. However, my first memory involves running across our lawn to the neighbors when I was a little over two and not looking for cars. I don’t remember the horn, I don’t remember the car but I recall fear and my mom and visually watching a car go by. No photos exist of the view, let alone the perspective from 2′ tall.

      But my earliest memory is of a very heightened emotional state which I imagine may play a role in a lot of early memory.

  17. You only remember things that happened to you as a kid, when you still think like a kid. How can this be news to anybody, every mom and dad must know about that.

    A very common grown-up version is when you only remember things that happened while you where drunk, when you are drunk. (Everybody who knows somebody, or is that somebody, who have a party trick, that they have learned while drunk at a party, that they can only perform when they are drunk at a party, reach up your hand!)

  18. Heh, my first memory was watching A New Hope at a drive-in from the back seat of my parents’ white Olds Cutlass. We drove back to the house in East San Jose we moved out of in early 1978, so it must have been the first theatrical release in 1977, which would have made me three-ish.

    And when Empire came out three years later, it was obvious to kids that Vader was lying. Somehow we lost that wisdom, and I think we’ve all been striving to get it back ever since (sniff).

  19. It has been conjectured that this memory loss is due to the first few years being largely devoted to learning patterns and pattern recognition (including language) and practicing retrieval.
    Abstract knowledge needs another layer of understanding and organisation, so some way of memory encoding abstract information (meta-information of sorts) is needed. Learning and adopting a new system of memory encoding and retrieval is likely to interfere with the previous version (kind of like upgrading firmware).
    Thus most memories from before that either get lost or extremely hard to retrieve. Some memories, especially those using organisation patterns similar to the later abstract pattern will be easier to retrieve.

    It is important to remember that around the same age children are adding immensely to their higher level understanding of the world. After an initial period of just learning things that they see with a sort of one-to-one relationship, suddenly they start making (cognitively) more complex connections.

  20. I always thought it was supposed to be neurologically impossible to have real memories of anything much before the age of three, because the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, very important in the creation of memories, do not develop into mature structures until the age of three or four years.

    But I guess this is what the researchers might be talking about when they say that there may be a different encoding in the earlier years.

  21. I had a weird old memory 20 years or so ago. I would have been around 30 when I had that memory. I remembered being behind the seat in a car on a blanket. When I described the scene to my folks, they said it was the back of an MG TD they had when I was around 1 year old (1963).

  22. I don’t know if it qualifies as a “real memory” as SamSam describes, but I certainly have images of being in my crib, as well as looking across the room from it to the bassinet (my bassinet? I’m not sure of the ownership there).

  23. I have an appalling memory, with most of my life being a blur.

    Anyway, my suspicion about early memories is that, because memory is plastic and recall itself allows the accessed memories to be edited and recrystallized, they are not the same memory originally stored at that age — they have been remembered since formation and overwritten with more maturely formatted and strongly connected layers, allowing it to be accessed again more easily.

  24. My six-year-old neighbor remembered so much! Year in, year out. Until he went to kindergarten this year. An amazing amount has been overwritten by school and especially, I think, being around other kids.

  26. My earliest memory is from around age 1, after that I have a memory from around age 2. Both were mildly traumatic events and I remember them very distinctly. After that, I’m not really sure. I know I have memories from around age 7. I’ve always found my memory to be strange, it’s great in certain areas and terrible in others. I’ve entirely forgotten most of my childhood, and because it wasn’t well documented I’m not even sure how much of what I remember actually happened.

  28. I have been told by many friends that I have a remarkable memory. I know of two early memories that my mother has verified for me. One was of my first inoculation by sugar cube, the other was when my brother was born; I was 18 months old for both events.

  29. Ironically, my earliest memory is of me waking up at 4 and thinking I had forgotten everything before that morning. I have no idea why I would have such a ludicrous thought, but it left such a strong impression I still remember it.

  30. My son described what it was like in the womb up until he was about two. Well, we assume it was life in the womb. He said something like “It was dark and there was this sound. BOOM! BOOM!”

    1. My daughter also described being in the womb, and I also have memories of it. I’ve asked around and I’ve never heard of others who can remember it so it was interesting to hear your kid’s story.

  31. I would’ve been about 15 months old – the fall of 1969. It’s a snapshot in my mind of a picture of a billboard promoting The Beatles’ new release, Abbey Road. Someone had had vandalized the billboard by cutting off Paul’s head. It was on the evening news. I even recall the end credits of The Carol Burnett Show which had run just before the news. (It’s sad how so many of our first memories are of something we saw on TV.)

    I mentioned this to someone in my teen years and was essentially called a liar because “nobody can remember anything from when they’re that young.” It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I was able to verify the memory – by finding a photo of the same billboard on the internet. Also, since Wikipedia has TV schedules from every year, I was also able to confirm that The Carol Burnett Show ran right before the evening news. My second earliest memory is somewhere around age three or four.

  32. I actually had developed written language sometime in those early years. It was some sort of up and down lines, and I remember (?) I was /then/ able to re-read what I wrote. Problem is, by the age I actually learned to read “real” letters (around 3, by myself following what mom and dad read to me in Donald Duck & Co.), I lost the ability to read my own script… For some of my later childhood my earlier writing graced some of the walls at home, as clear evidence of that lost civilization, and the wisdom of my parents, who had designated certain walls as available for me and my sister to draw on. At 5 (1969!) I started to make a map of the stars in the sky, but that’s another story.

  33. I have some memories from earlier than 3 years old.

    The earliest is being intensely curious and poking something into a hole and a blue flash — the result of poking a screwdriver into an electrical socket. My mother confirmed that happened before I could walk.

    I also recall the first time we visited the house where my sister was born, before we moved in and it became home. I would have been about 2.

    A little later I remember being in nappies (diapers for the US audience), sat on a tricycle and being determined to keep on pedaling despite sitting on an enormous poo and being called in by my mother. (Nasty tactile memory that one).

    My sister was born at home when I was 3 and I remember her as a new arrival, the morning after she was born.

    The memory of my sister being born is like an adult memory. The others are more flashes of images, touch and emotion.

    1. Thanks. e.e. :-)

      Most of my early memories are from around age 4. Some of them are earlier. A subset of these I discount because I know I’ve seen photographs and heard retellings of them later on. Others, though… I’m pretty sure they’re real, because no one else would bother recording or talking about them.

      One thing I always remembered from when I was about 2 and a half was my older sister locking me outside (she thought it was funny), but for a while I didn’t believe it actually happened, and assumed I imagined it… and then my sister apologized for it when I was about 12.
      I also remember getting my leg stuck, trying to climb out of my crib. I remember the day we got rid of my crib. I remember a really crazy dream I had (again, when I still had a crib). I remember looking at myself in a mirror when I still had blond hair (which changed to brown at about age 3). And my mom cleaning my teeth with her dental hygienist tools (I started going to the dentist well before I was 4).

      And @#39… that’s crazy! What was it like?

      I wonder, if you could ask an 18 month old, if they would have memories of being one? Or if a newborn has memories of thew womb? The brain is rewiring itself quite a bit at that age. Are we just forgetting how to open obsolete file formats? Or ios the data being overwritten, the neurons switched over to some other purpose?

  35. whats really weird is some of these memories that people are commenting about are making me remember random childhood events!

    crazy brain.. how does it work?

  36. Speaking of Return of the Jedi, Leia has a pretty awesome memory: she remembers her real mother, who according to the new trilogy died within a minute of her birth.

  37. I tend to consider my memory to be rather poor; I don’t usually forget important stuff (i.e. major things I need to do for school or work or whatever) but will forget appointments, birthdays and other important dates, etc. I don’t remember things that have already passed either; previous happenings that come up in casual conversation often leave me baffled because someone’s apparently claiming I did something or went somewhere that I can’t remember at all! (usually the reminder does make me remember, but not always).

    I can’t keep a calendar to help because I forget to write things in the calendar (I’ve got one set up on my android phone just in case I do remember to write things down in it, but then I won’t remember to look at it).

    So when it comes to childhood memories, there are only a few random things, as others are saying. Except my childhood memory range extends into high school – it’s not until college that I can remember a fair amount of stuff, and even a lot of stuff from college I can’t remember unless reminded (I’m 24 so it’s not like it’s a long time ago!)

    The interesting thing to me, though, is that I can’t place memories at a specific age. I can remember certain things from my childhood, but I couldn’t tell you what age I was. I can’t ever remember what age range goes with each grade, so sometimes I can remember things from certain grades in school, but I’m not sure how old that means I was. So I have a distorted perception of the timeline of my childhood memories.

    I cite this inability to remember things as a major reason why I got into photography, at around the end of high school – after which is the time when I can remember things more clearly. Even so, every time I look at my old photographs I see things that I’d completely forgotten. Often I don’t remember even when I’m looking at the photographic evidence, as if it were someone else’s photograph! So, it’s important to me to photograph things.

    Except, of course, that I *very* often forget to take photographs :)

  38. I don’t really remember much of my childhood at all and I am only 25. I do have a couple of memories, but none that would be earlier than 4. I think something has to happen that attaches an emotion to the memory as well and that is why, for lack of a better term, it saves.

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