Eight-year-old Francis Csedrik pauses mid-swing in his backyard in Washington, D.C. Like most kids, he's gradually losing his memories of things that happened when he was 3 years old. Credit: Meg Vogel/NPR
Scientists have known about childhood amnesia for more than a century. But it's only in the past decade that they have begun to figure out when childhood memories start to fade, which early memories are most likely to survive, and how we create a complete autobiography without direct memories of our earliest years.
For a long time, scientists thought childhood amnesia occurred because the brains of young children simply couldn't form lasting memories of specific events. Then, in the 1980s, Bauer and other researchers began testing the memories of children as young as 9 months old, in some cases using gestures and objects instead of words.
Some early memories are more likely than others to survive childhood amnesia, says Carole Peterson at Memorial University of Newfoundland. One example, she says, is a memory that carries a lot of emotion.
Peterson showed this in a study of children who'd been to a hospital emergency room when they were as young as 2 for injuries such as a broken bone or a cut serious enough to require stitches. "These were very emotional, very significant events," Peterson says. "And what we have found is that even 10 years later, children have enormously good memory of that."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/08/299189442/the-forgotten-childhood-why-early-memories-fade
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