Most adults do not remember anything before the age of 3 or 4, a gap that researchers had chalked up to the vagaries of the still-developing infant brain. By some accounts, the infant brain was just not equipped to remember much.
Textbooks referred to the deficiency as infant amnesia.
Carolyn Rovee-Collier, a developmental psychologist at Rutgers University who died on Oct. 2 at 72, challenged the theory, showing in a series of papers in the early 1980s that babies remember plenty. A 3-month-old can recall what he or she learned yesterday, she found, and a 9-month-old can remember a game for as long as a month and a half.
She cited experiments suggesting that memory processes in adults and infants are virtually the same, and argued that infant memories were never lost. They just become increasingly harder to retrieve as the child grows, learns language and loses touch with the visual triggers that had kept those memories sharp — a view from between the bars of a crib, say, or the view of the floor as a crawler, not a toddler, sees it.
Not all of Dr. Rovee-Collier’s theories won over the psychology establishment, which still uses the infant amnesia concept to explain why people do not remember life as a baby.
But her insights about an infant’s short-term memory and ability to learn have been widely accepted, and have helped recast scientific thinking about the infant mind over the past 30 years. Since the first of her 200 papers was published, infant cognitive studies has undergone a boom in university programs around the country.
[For more go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/us/carolyn-rovee-collier-who-said-babies-have-clear-memories-is-dead-at-72.html?ref=health&_r=0]
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