Memento
What do children remember, and what do they forget?
by Heather Turgeon
January 12, 2009
When Casey told her son Will that the Weisses were coming over for dinner that night, his response took her by surprise: "Don't forget the strawberry cupcakes." Three-year-old Will was recalling that the Weiss' son liked the cupcakes Casey had served at a dinner party eight months earlier, when he was only two. As precocious as his memory might seem, though, by the time Will reaches school age, the strawberry cupcakes will be gone, along with his recollections of most, if not all, of his first three years.
Psychologists refer to this as "childhood amnesia." But it only applies to certain kinds of memory — kids retain plenty of information from the early years. If Will's dad teaches him to throw a baseball, he may remember how for the rest of his life. Not only that, but the emotional memories of childhood have a lasting impact. Long after the image of the cupcakes has faded, Will might be left with warm feelings towards sweets and social gatherings. Researchers now know this is because the brain doesn't have just one record button. By studying healthy kids as well as adults who have lost certain kinds of memory completely, psychologists have come a long way in explaining how early childhood can be so formative long after our memories of these years have completely vanished.
The most famous patient in brain research, Henry Molaison, known for decades as H.M., passed away recently in a nursing home in Connecticut. Born in 1926, he suffered from severe epilepsy until, at age twenty-seven, he underwent a radical surgery in which doctors removed two slivers deep in his brain, just at ear level. When H.M. woke up, his seizure disorder was cured, but he had lost the ability to form new memories. He remembered his childhood, but, from the time of the surgery until his death at age eighty-three, new memories stayed in his consciousness for about twenty seconds and then disappeared. A lot of what we know today about how memory develops began with H.M. It turns out that for the first few months of life, babies operate much like the famous amnesiac. Babies then gradually become more skilled at memory as the part of their brain that H.M. lived without begins to grow.
Newborns are surprisingly good at knowing what they've seen before.
Even though their memories are just beginning to ripen, newborns are surprisingly good at knowing what they've seen or heard before, a skill referred to as recognition. To test the abilities of the tiniest babies, researchers take advantage of the infant sucking reflex. When they are given a pacifier that controls what they see or hear, depending on how fast they suck, babies just days old will adjust their sucking rates to spend more time looking at a picture of mom's face, or listening to the words of a book she read aloud in her pregnancy. The fact that a baby recognizes what is familiar to her (and prefers to see and hear her parents) means that, in some form, she is storing memories of her experiences right from the start.
An experiment designed by Carolyn Rovee-Collier in the 1970s is still used today to test just how long infant memories are stored. Researchers lay a baby on her back so that she's looking up at a mobile. They tie the mobile to the baby's foot with a ribbon so that when she kicks, the mobile comes to life. The baby quickly learns to kick more vigorously to watch the mobile dance. Then, after days have passed without any exposure to the set up, she is put back in her crib with the mobile, but it's no longer attached to her foot. When they see the mobile, most babies start to kick furiously, remembering the fun they had with it days before. Two-month-olds remember if they are tested a day or two later, while six-month-olds remember for about two weeks.
©2009 Heather Turgeon and Babble Media
About the Author
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Heather Turgeon is a psychotherapist who works with individuals and couples and runs Mommy and Me classes at the Pump Station in Los Angeles. She lives in Santa Monica with her husband and toddler. |
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