Although infants use their memories to learn new information, few adults can remember events in their lives that happened prior to the age of three. Psychologists at Emory University have now documented that age seven is when these earliest memories tend to fade into oblivion, a phenomenon known as "childhood amnesia."
The journal Memory published the research, which involved interviewing children about past events in their lives, starting at age three. Different subsets of the group of children were then tested for recall of these events at ages five, six, seven, eight and nine.
"Our study is the first empirical demonstration of the onset of childhood amnesia," says Emory psychologist Patricia Bauer, who led the study. "We actually recorded the memories of children, and then we followed them into the future to track when they forgot these memories."
The study's co-author is Marina Larkina, a manager of research projects for Emory's Department of Psychology.
The Bauer Memory Development Lab focuses on how episodic, or autobiographical memory, changes through childhood and early adulthood.