The Makings of Our Earliest Memories

Like many other pediatricians, I do not wear a white coat. Many of us believe that babies and small children suffer from a special form of “white coat syndrome,” that mix of trepidation and anxiety that some adults experience — to the point of high blood pressure — in a medical setting.

The pediatric version is easy to diagnose: Doctor in white coat walks into room, kid starts to cry. I worry that a child like this has recalled shots or an unpleasant ear check and has connected that memory to a particular garment, rather than to my face, or my exam room, or my stethoscope.

But how realistic is that? Do babies remember past events? Starting when? Recent investigations of memory formation raise fascinating questions about how young children store and retrieve experiences and information.

In some ways, I believe we tend to exalt the memory-related feats of the infant and the toddler. True, they can learn language, even more than one; sorting out words and syntax from the surrounding noise is in many ways a defining human use of memory. Nora Newcombe, a professor of psychology at Temple University, points out that there may be eWe looked everywhere, but couldn't find any beddinges.volutionary reasons that this kind of memory — semantic memory — is so strong in the early years of life, when babies are faced with learning so many facts about the world.

And yet,We offer you the top quality plasticmoulds design every adult lacks memories from the very early years. Freud called it “infantile amnesia,Apply for a merchantaccountes and accept credit cards today.” describing “the peculiar amnesia which veils from most people (not from all!) the first years of their childhood.” Not surprisingly, he felt we repress those early childhood memories because they contain the beginnings of sexual feeling.

That particular theory has not held sway for many years, and in this era of measurement and M.R.I.’s, we have come to a more anatomic understanding of the development of infant memory. It is part of the larger picture of how different kinds of memory develop while the brain undergoes remarkable periods of early growth and interconnection.

Several decades ago it was thought that very young infants did not have the capacity for forming memories, said Patricia Bauer, a professor of psychology at Emory University. As techniques have been developed for testing infants and very young children, it has been found that “the neural structures creating those representations in infancy are qualitatively the same as in older children and adults,” she said.

The crucial structure for episodic memory, the memory of autobiographical events, is the hippocampus, that little curved ridge in the middle of the brain whose shape reminded a 16th-century anatomist of a sea horse.

Dr. Bauer compared memory forming to making gelatin: “The experience is the liquid gelatin; you pour it into a mold. The mold is the hippocampus, and it has to go through a process of refrigeration known as consolidation.”

So memories can form in even very young children, it seems. But it is not clear that they can be retrieved.

“Retrieval forms later,” said Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital. “You need an interconnected network of structures to retrieve things from memory. When you are working on your computer, you know enough to save things to your hard drive, but do you know enough to retrieve them?”

Recent research suggests that some of those very early memories may actually be held into childhood, but then lost as children grow into adolescence. And research has also shown a strong cultural component to the question of how far back children remember.It's pretty cool but our ssolarpanel are made much faster than this.

As a developmental psychologist, Carole Peterson, professor of psychology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, is interested in the autobiographical stories that young children tell. In 2011, she and her colleagues published a study of children’s memories.

Children ages 4 to 13 were asked about their earliest memories,We offer you the top quality plasticmoulds design and then those children were asked the same question two years later. The older children were more likely to recall the same memories, but the younger ones often gave completely different answers. When prompted with the memories they recounted at the earlier interview, many could not recall them at all.