Language, Memory, and Cognition in Infancy and Early Childhood

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Amnesia, Infantile

P.J. Bauer    Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Glossary

Autobiographical memory   Constituted of memories of specific events from the past that have relevance to the self; also characterized by a sense of reliving at the time of retrieval from memory.

Autonoetic awareness   Conscious or self-knowing awareness; in the case of autobiographical memory, awareness that the source of one’s memory is an event that happened at some point in the past.

Childhood amnesia   Synonymous with infantile amnesia; the relative paucity among adults for memories of events from the first 3 years of life and a gradual increase in memories of events from ages 3–7 years, when an adult-like distribution is reached.

Elaborative style   A narrative style adopted by some parents in conversations with their children, marked by more cues to and details about past events, and invitations to the child to co-construct the story of the event.

Hippocampus  

Medial temporal structure implicated in the encoding and consolidation of new memories of events and experiences.

Infantile amnesia   Synonymous with childhood amnesia.

Repetitive style   A narrative style adopted by some parents in conversations with their children, marked by repetition of questions seeking specific information, fewer cues and details, and overall fewer contributions to conversations.

Temporal cortical network   Network of neural structures implicated in memory for past events and experiences; includes cortical and medial temporal structures, including the hippocampus.

Introduction

Infantile or childhood amnesia is the relative paucity among adults for autobiographical memories from early childhood. It is virtually universal yet there are individual and group differences in its offset and density. Explanation of the amnesia requires understanding of the development of autobiographical memory in childhood, the course of which is multiply determined, by factors ranging from brain development to culture. These multiple dynamic sources of variance contribute to differences in the rate of formation of memories and the rate at which they are forgotten. The crossover of these complementary functions marks the offset of infantile amnesia.

Infantile Amnesia

Adults have relatively continuous personal histories from about the age of 7 years onward. That is, adults can recall events that took place from age 7 years or older, place them in spatial and temporal context, and attribute to them some degree of personal relevance or significance. Prior to age 7 years, however, most adults suffer from an amnesic syndrome that has two phases. From the first phase – prior to age 3 years – adults have few if any personal or autobiographical memories. From the second phase – between the ages of 3 and 7 years – adults have a smaller number of autobiographical memories than would be expected based on forgetting alone. In the literature, this two-part phenomenon is known as infantile amnesia or childhood amnesia.

For What Is There Amnesia?

Childhood amnesia is a paucity of a certain type of memory known as autobiographical memory. Autobiographical memories relate to events that happened to one’s self; events in which one participated; and about which one had emotions, thoughts, reactions, and reflections. From a theoretical standpoint, childhood amnesia is interesting and important because of its implications for one’s sense of self. Although we consider ourselves as continuous in space and time, there is a point in development at which that continuity ends. That moment in time is the boundary of childhood amnesia. Childhood amnesia thus presents itself as apparent evidence of discontinuity in development.

In addition to the defining feature of self-relevance, autobiographical memories have a number of characteristic features. They tend to (1) be of unique events that happened at a specific place, at a specific time; (2) entail a sense of conscious, autonoetic, or self-knowing awareness that one is re-experiencing an event that happened at some point in the past; (3) be expressed verbally; (4) be long-lasting; and (5) be veridical. This family resemblance definition of autobiographical memory (i.e., a concept specified by characteristic, as opposed to defining, features) has important implications for how we conceptualize its developmental course (see section entitled ‘Explaining autobiographical memory development’).

The Phenomenon of Infantile or Childhood Amnesia

Age of Earliest Memory

Research on the phenomenon that would come to be called childhood amnesia dates back to the 1890s when scholars conducted surveys of adults asking them to think about the earliest experience they could remember, and how old they were at the time. The results were consistent, with respondents dating their earliest memories to age 3 years. The phenomenon received its name in 1905, when Sigmund Freud coined the term to describe the early memories of some of his patients. He noticed that few of the adults he saw in his psychoanalytic practice had memories from their early years and that the memories they did have were sketchy and incomplete.

Subsequent to these early investigations, numerous studies of adults’ memories of their childhoods have been conducted. They have yielded one of the most robust findings in the memory literature, namely, that in Western cultures, among adults, the average age of earliest autobiographical memory is 3–3.5 years. This age is obtained whether participants are asked to respond to free recall prompts such as those used by the early researchers of the phenomenon, or whether they are asked to remember a specific event the date of which is clearly known, such as the birth of a younger sibling.

Distribution of Early Memories

The age of earliest memory is only one component of the definition of childhood amnesia. The second component is that from the ages of 3 to 7 years, the number of memories that adults are able to retrieve is smaller than the number expected based on forgetting alone. Normal forgetting is a linear function of the time since experience of an event. Among adults, however, there is an under-representation of memories from ages 3 to 7 years. The strongest evidence of this under-representation is from studies employing the cue-word technique: respondents are asked to provide a memory related to each of a number of cue words (e.g., ice cream), and to estimate how old they were at the time of the event. From these data researchers have created distributions of memories over the first decade of life; a sample such distribution is illustrated in Figure 1. Both components of childhood amnesia are clearly apparent in the figure. Respondents report few memories from the period before age 3 years. The number of memories reported increases gradually from 3 to 7 years, at which time a steeper, more adult-like distribution is observed. This pattern has proved to be quite robust. It is observed regardless of the specific method used to elicit the memories and the age of the respondents at the time the memories were cued.

Figure 1 Schematic representation of the distribution of autobiographical memories from the first 10 years of life.

The Universality of Childhood Amnesia

One of the features of childhood amnesia that makes it so compelling is its universality. That is, virtually every adult suffers from it, to one extent or another. That does not mean that its form is identical across individuals, however. There are individual and group differences in the timing of its offset, in its density, and in the content of reports of early memories. The differences are interesting and important in their own right. They also are critical to evaluation of theories as to the sources of childhood amnesia in that an adequate theory must account not only for the normative trend, but for individual and group differences as well.

Individual Differences

Whereas more than a century of research has revealed age 3–3.5 years as the average age of earliest memory, from the beginning of the study of adults’ early autobiographical memories, individual differences in the age of earliest memory have been apparent. In virtually all historical and contemporary reports of adults’ early autobiographical memories that provide information on variability, there are instances of a small number of memories from the first year of life. Memories from at least some respondents from age 2 years are more the rule than the exception. There are also differences in the latest early memory, with some adults reporting their earliest memory from as old as 6–9 years of age. There are few developmental phenomena for which the age of onset is so variable. In addition to differences in the age of earliest memory, there are individual differences among adults in the density of early memories. That is, some adults are able to recall many memories from their childhood years, whereas others remember only a few.

Group Differences

Table 1 summarizes some of the groups for which differences in the age of earliest memory have been reported, three of which are discussed below.

Table 1

Group differences in the age of earliest memory

Gender. Of all the possible sources of group difference in the age of earliest memory one could contemplate, possible gender differences have received the most attention. A consistent finding is that women have memories from earlier in life than do men. In some cases the differences are statistically reliable, whereas in other cases they are not. Regardless of their statistical reliability, differences in the ages of earliest memories for women and men typically are small in magnitude.

There are also some reports of differences in the length of women’s and men’s reports of early childhood events, in their affective qualities, and in the interpersonal themes represented in them. Specifically (1) women tend to provide longer, more detailed, and more vivid accounts of their early memories, relative to men; (2) women more often refer to anger, shame, and guilt in the earliest memories relative to men; and (3) women’s early emotional memories tend to concern attachment issues (i.e., concerns regarding security, approval, separation, and reunion), whereas those of men tend to concern competence issues (i.e., concerns regarding ability, performance, achievement, and identity).

Birth order. Although it has received significantly less research attention, relative to gender, birth order also has been found to be systematically related to age of earliest memory. Children who are first-born have earlier memories than children who are later-born. There also appear to be differences in the age of earliest memory as a function of the number of children in the family, and their spacing. Only-children have earlier autobiographical memories, relative to the oldest children in multichild families. First-borns for whom there is a larger difference in ages between themselves and their oldest siblings report autobiographical memories from earlier in life, relative to first-borns whose oldest siblings are more closely spaced.

Culture. Most of the research on adults’ early memories has been conducted with individuals from Western societies, including Canada, the UK, and the US. Studies with individuals from Eastern cultures make clear the limits to generalizability of the findings from Western culture. There are systematic differences in the age of earliest memory with Western samples reporting memories from earlier in life, relative to the Eastern samples. In some cases the differences are pronounced, with American adults reporting memories that are a year or more earlier than adults from Eastern cultures.

There are also cultural differences in the content of adult women’s and men’s reports of their early experiences. For example, relative to respondents from Eastern cultures, Americans provide longer memory narratives; their memories are more frequently of a single event or specific memory, as opposed to a more general memory; and they more frequently comment on their own experiences and attitudes, including emotions and feeling states.

Explaining Infantile or Childhood Amnesia

Why is it that adults experience amnesia for events from the first 3–3.5 years of life, and have fewer memories from the ages of 3 to 7 years than would be expected based on forgetting alone? There are two major categories of theories to explain childhood amnesia. By one category of accounts, memories for early-life events are formed, but later functionally disappear or become inaccessible. By the other category of accounts, adults lack memories of events from infancy and very early childhood because, in effect, no memories were created. Alternatively, memories were created but lacked an important feature or features that precluded them from being entered into the autobiographical record.

Memories Are Formed but Become Inaccessible

One category of explanation for childhood amnesia suggests that young children and perhaps even infants form memories of the events of their lives, but that over the course of time and development, these early memories become inaccessible.

Freud’s explanation in terms of repression and screening. In 1905, Sigmund Freud delivered a lecture in which he gave infantile or childhood amnesia its name. In the lecture he commented on the fact that the first 6–8 years of life are full of accomplishments (e.g., children learn to walk and talk, they accrue a lot of knowledge about the world, and so forth) yet adults remember few of the experiences that led to them. He further commented that the memories that survive seem unreliable. He deemed them unreliable because the early memories that his patients reported were not of the psychic struggles that Freud assumed consumed much of mental life but of bland, unemotional, and often commonplace events and experiences. Freud was also impressed by the observation that his patients often described their memories from the unrealistic third-person perspective. That is, rather than through the eyes of the beholder, the memories were described as from the perspective of a third party. Given that this was an impossible perspective for an autobiographical memory, Freud concluded that these memories were the result of reconstructive processes. Based on these observations, Freud advanced the theory that early memories were blockaded or screened from consciousness. He suggested that the relative paucity of early memories was due to repression of inappropriate or disturbing content of early, often traumatic (due to their sexual nature) experiences. Events that were not repressed were altered to remove the offending content. In effect, he hypothesized that the negative emotion in these memories was screened off, leaving only the bland skeleton of a significant experience.

Freud’s explanation for childhood amnesia in terms of repression and affective screening was internally consistent with his larger theoretical framework. External to the theory, however, the explanation has not fared especially well. One issue is that although adults remember fewer early-life events than would be expected based on forgetting alone, they nevertheless have more memories from childhood than would be expected by Freud’s model of repression. In addition, contrary to the suggestion that memories of early-life events would be devoid of emotion or overwhelmingly positive, both traumatic and non-traumatic events from childhood are recalled. In some studies, memories of negative episodes actually outnumber positive episodes. A second issue is that although many early memories are from the third-person perspective, there are also many from the first-person perspective. Moreover, many later memories are from the third-person perspective. Some scholars suggest that the perspective adopted has more to do with the event being remembered than age at the time it occurred. Today, Freud’s suggestions of repression and screening of early memories generally are not considered adequate explanations for childhood amnesia.

Different cognitive lenses. The second exemplar of an explanation of childhood amnesia in terms of memories that are formed but become inaccessible is actually not itself a unified theory. Instead, it is a category of explanations that has in common the suggestion that there are different cognitive lenses for different times of life. As individuals change lenses over the course of their lives, they lose the ability to access memories created with the old lens type (not unlike the inaccessibility that results from a change in operating systems on a computer). By some accounts, the lenses differ in their reliance on language. Because they lack language, infants and young children encode memories visually or imaginally, but not symbolically. With the advent of language skills, exclusively nonverbal encoding gives way to primarily verbal encoding. As the system becomes more and more verbally saturated, it becomes increasingly difficult to gain access to memories encoded without language.

Other accounts place emphasis not on language but on differences in life periods, each of which has distinct hopes, fears, and challenges, for example. Life periods may correspond to elementary vs. secondary school vs. college, or before vs. after marriage, or before vs. after retirement. Memories from different lifetime periods may differ from those from the current period not only because of the passage of time, but because of the new phase of life, which may herald concomitant changes in thinking or world view.

Models that implicate different cognitive lenses as the explanation for childhood amnesia make two critical predictions, namely, that (1) early memories are not accessible later in life, and (2) memories from within a life period should be more readily accessible than memories across life periods. Though it is negative in nature, there is overwhelming evidence for the first of these predictions. If we allow that infants and children form memories (see section titled ‘Explaining autobiographical memory development’ for evidence that they do), then the very phenomenon of childhood amnesia is one of later inaccessibility of early memories. Critically, there is no direct evidence that developments in language actually cause early memories to become inaccessible. Moreover, although preverbal memories do not readily lend themselves to verbal description, under some circumstances, they can be described with language once it is acquired.

There is evidence that memories from within a life period are more readily accessible than memories across life periods. Some of the most compelling illustrations come from studies in which immigrants are asked to retrieve memories of events that took place before vs. after they emigrated. Memories retrieved from the time before immigration more frequently are in the native language and memories retrieved from the time after immigration more frequently are in the language of the adopted home. Similarly, cue words from the native language elicit memories from before immigration, whereas cue words from the language of the adopted home elicit memories from after immigration. Thus, it seems that memories from within a life period are more accessible in the language of that period. Other reasons why memories might become differentially accessible over time are discussed in ‘Explaining autobiographical memory development’.

Autobiographical Memories of Early Life Events Are Lacking

The second category of explanation of childhood amnesia suggests that adults have few autobiographical memories from infancy and very early childhood because during this period no such memories were formed, due to general or more specific cognitive deficits. Similarly, these accounts explain that the number of memories that adults have from the preschool period is smaller than would be expected based on forgetting alone because during this period autobiographical memory competence is under construction and so, consequently, there are relatively fewer memories from this period.

The suggestion that cognitive deficits explain the relative paucity of memories from early in life has had a number of proponents but the name that is most readily associated with the perspective is Jean Piaget. Although Piaget did not advance a specific theory of childhood amnesia, he nonetheless provided a compelling explanation for it. He maintained that for the first 18–24 months of life, infants and children did not have the capacity for symbolic representation. As a result, they could not mentally represent objects and entities in their absence. They thus had no mechanism for recall of past events.

Piaget further suggested that even once children had constructed the capacity to represent past events, they still were without the cognitive structures that would permit them to organize events along coherent dimensions that would make the events memorable. One of the most significant dimensions that Piaget suggested preschool-age children lacked was an understanding of temporal order. Specifically, he suggested that it was not until children were ~5–7 years of age that they developed the ability to sequence events temporally. Without this fundamental organizational device, children were not able to form coherent memories of the events of their lives. The more contemporary, so-called neo-Piagetian perspectives suggest that limits on cognitive capacity (e.g., working memory capacity) either prevent information from being encoded in an accessible format to begin with, or that limitations on retrieval mechanisms prevent it from being recalled at a later time.

There are also suggestions that specific conceptual changes play a role in the explanation of childhood amnesia. By some accounts, adults have few memories from early in life because, for the first 2 years, there is no ‘cognitive self ’ around which memories can be organized. As a consequence, there is no ‘auto’ in autobiographical. By other accounts, for the first 5–7 years of their lives, children lack autonoetic awareness, rendering it impossible for them to create memories that have this characteristic feature. As a consequence, autobiographical memories are not formed and thus are not available to be retrieved by adults.

The suggestions that infants and very young children lack the symbolic capacity to form memories and that the memories of preschool-age children are disorganized are no longer tenable. As will be seen in the next section, even in the first year of life infants encode and later retrieve memories of past events. Nevertheless, there are pronounced changes in the basic processes of memory, which have implications for the reliability, robustness, and temporal extent of memory through infancy and early childhood. Thus, although infants and very young children are no longer seen as total mnemonically incompetent, neither are their memory systems as effective and efficient as those of adults. The differences have implications for the density of representation of autobiographical memories from the early years of life (see section–entitled ‘Explaining autobiographical memory development’). Finally, it is increasingly apparent that no single factor, such as development of a self concept or absence of autonoetic awareness, will provide a sufficient explanation for why autobiographical memory seems to begin when it does or why adults lack autobiographical memories from a period of their lives (respectively). Rather, it is recognized that autobiographical memory is a complex, multifaceted capacity, the development and operation of which are influenced by many factors.

Explaining Autobiographical Memory Development

Autobiographical memory involves a number of capacities and skills. It requires that events and experiences be encoded and stored in an accessible manner, and later retrieved. Once retrieved, the memory must be expressed. The most informative expression is via a narrative that provides the listener with information about the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the event. Moreover, autobiographical memories are of events that happened to the self at a specific place and time. They are accurate, long-lasting, and when they are retrieved, there is a sense of awareness that they are based on past experience. Critically, each of these aspects of the ability has its own developmental course. An adequate explanation of the development of autobiographical memory – and thus of achievement of an adult-like distribution of memories – must recognize this complexity as well as account for the individual and group variability that is apparent in autobiographical records. This is best accomplished by undertaking analysis at multiple levels, ranging from the brain systems that support memory to the cultural influences on verbal expression of memory.

The Neural Substrate of Autobiographical Memory and Its Development

The ability to encode, store, and later retrieve autobiographical memories depends on a multicomponent neural network that includes structures in the medial temporal lobes (including the hippocampus), as well as neocortical structures. The network is schematically represented in Figure 2. Specifically, primary, secondary, and association cortices register what we are seeing, smelling, hearing, and so forth, and integrate it all into a coherent experience. For that experience to endure beyond the moment, it must be consolidated into a memory trace. Consolidation depends on neurochemical and neuroanatomical changes that create a physical record of the experience. The processes are carried out by medial temporal structures in general and the hippocampus in particular, in concert with the cortex. Throughout the period of consolidation – which may take weeks to months in the human – memories are vulnerable to disruption and interference. Eventually, however, they become stabilized, and no longer require the participation of the hippocampus for their survival. Rather, they are maintained in the cortices that gave rise to the original experience. Finally, the prefrontal cortex in particular is implicated in retrieval of memory traces from these long-term stores.

Figure 2 Schematic representation of the flow of information through the temporal cortical network responsible for formation of autobiographical memories. DG, dentate gyrus.

Portions of the medial temporal structures mature relatively early. For instance, the cells that make up most of the hippocampus are formed in the first half of gestation and, by the end of the prenatal period, virtually all have migrated to their adult locations. In some areas of the hippocampus, synapses are present as early as 15 weeks gestational age. By ∼ 6 postnatal months, the number and density of synapses have reached adult levels, as has glucose utilization in the temporal cortex. In contrast, development of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus is protracted. At birth, the dentate gyrus includes only ∼ 70% of the adult number of cells and it is not until 12–15 postnatal months that the morphology of the structure appears adult-like. Maximum density of synaptic connections in the dentate gyrus is also reached relatively late. The density of synapses increases dramatically (to well above adult levels) beginning at 8–12 postnatal months and reaches its peak at 16–20 months. After a period of relative stability, excess synapses are pruned until adult levels are reached at ∼ 4–5 years of age.

The association areas also develop slowly. For instance, it is not until the seventh prenatal month that all six cortical layers are apparent. The density of synapses in prefrontal cortex increases dramatically beginning at 8 postnatal months and peaks between 15 and 24 months. Pruning to adult levels is delayed until puberty and beyond. Other maturational changes in the prefrontal cortex, such as myelination, continue into adolescence, and adult levels of some neurotransmitters are not seen until the second and third decades of life.

The full temporal cortical network can be expected to function as an integrated whole only once each of its components, as well as the connections between them, has reached a level of functional maturity. This leads to the prediction of emergence of long-term memory by late in the first year of life, with significant development over the course of the second year, and continued (albeit less dramatic) development for years thereafter. The timeframe is based on increases in the formation of new synapses beginning at ∼ 8 months in both the dentate gyrus and prefrontal cortex, with continued synaptogenesis through 20 and 24 months, respectively. The expectation of developmental changes for months and years thereafter stems from the schedule of protracted selective reduction in synapses both in the dentate gyrus (until 4–5 years) and in the prefrontal cortex (throughout adolescence or early adulthood).

Developments in Basic Memory Processes

The relatively late development of aspects of the temporal cortical network has implications for behavior. Because of their involvement in all phases of the life of a memory, protracted development of cortical structures can be expected to impact the encoding, consolidation, and storage, as well as retrieval, of memories. Late development of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus is critical because, at least in the adult, it is the major means by which information makes its way from the cortex into the hippocampus where new memory traces are consolidated for long-term storage (see Figure 2). The immaturity of these structures and connections between them would present challenges to these processes. As they develop, we would expect to see age-related changes in behavior.

The time course of changes in behavior matches what is known about developments in the temporal cortical memory network. Using nonverbal measures of memory (elicited and deferred imitation in which props are used to produce novel sequences of actions that infants are invited to imitate), researchers have demonstrated that between 9 and 20 months of age, the length of time over which recall is apparent increases dramatically, from 1 to 12 months. Over the same period, the robustness of memory increases such that infants remember more, based on fewer experiences of events. In addition, long-term memory is more reliably observed. Whereas at 9 months of age only ∼ 50% of infants show evidence of long-term recall, by 20 months, individual differences in whether or not infants recall are the exception rather than the rule (though there remain individual differences in how much is remembered).

Because the actions and sequences on which infants are tested are novel to them, their behavior provides evidence that they are able to remember unique events. Moreover, because infants recall sequences in the correct temporal order, there is evidence that they remember when events occurred. Infants also demonstrate that they remember specific features of events, in that they reliably select the correct objects from arrays including objects that are different from, yet perceptually similar to, those used to produce event sequences. These behaviors make clear that by the end of the second year of life, children have many of the memory skills necessary to form an autobiography.

Over the course of the preschool years, memory abilities change in at least two important ways that are relevant to developments in autobiographical memory. First, memory processes sharpen to the point that a single experience of an event is sufficient to ensure retention over the long term. Prior to the preschool years, very long retention is seemingly dependent on multiple experiences of an event. In contrast, by the age of 3–4 years, children remember events experienced only once. This age-related change likely is linked to developments in the temporal cortical network supporting memory. Second, children develop the ability to locate events in a particular time and place. This development is apparent in age-related increases in the use of temporal markers such as yesterday and last summer, for example. Such markers serve as a time line along which records of events can be ordered. These and other changes in basic memory abilities mean that more events can be stored with more of the elements of autobiographical memories: unique events, with distinctive features, accurately located in time and place, that are maintained for long periods of time.

Developments in Nonmnemonic Abilities

Developments in nonmemory abilities also contribute to age-related improvements in autobiographical memory. Two of the most prominent have already been mentioned: changes in self-concept and development of autonoetic awareness.

Self-concept. Because autobiographical memories are about one’s self, a self-concept is a necessary ingredient for an autobiographical memory. Children’s first references to themselves in past events occur at about the same point in developmental time as they begin to recognize themselves in a mirror. In the second half of the second year of life, children who recognize themselves in the mirror have more robust event memories and they make faster progress in independent autobiographical reports, relative to children who do not yet exhibit self-recognition. Over the preschool years, there are further developments in recognition of continuity of self over time, both in physical features and in psychological characteristics. These developments have implications for autobiographical memory: for a past event to be relevant to present self, the rememberer must realize that the self who is remembering is the same as the self who experienced the event in the past. Also over the preschool years children develop a more subjective perspective on experience. This facilitates inclusion of events in an autobiographical record because experiences are not just objective events that play out, but are events that influence the self in one way or another. The personal significance of the events is conveyed, in particular, by references to the emotional and cognitive states of the one who experiences. Such references indicate the sense of personal ownership and unique perspective that is so characteristic of autobiographical memories. Together, these and other developments in the self concept mean that more aspects of more events have relevance to the self thus providing more opportunity for formation of self-relevant memories.

Autonoetic awareness. Retrieval of autobiographical memories is accompanied by autonoetic awareness: an understanding that the recollected event is one that happened in the past. It is not until children are 4–6 years of age that they reliably identify the sources of their knowledge. This ability aids in location of events in space and time, thereby contributing to the specificity of memories (as discussed earlier in this section). Understanding that the source of a current cognition is a past event can also contribute to better event narratives. Children who have this realization can be expected to provide their listeners with orientation to the circumstances of the past; to advise them of the specifics of the event, such as who was there and where it took place; and to provide their own subjective perspective on the event. Consistent with this suggestion, 3.5–4.5-year-olds who perform better on tasks that measure their understanding of knowledge also have more sophisticated conversational skills. Autonoetic awareness may foster autobiographical memory development more directly as well. As children come to appreciate that the sources of their cognitions are representations, and that others too have representations, both of which are unique to the individuals, they can begin to construct personal perspectives on events. Over time, the practice of reflecting on one’s evaluation of an event would be expected to foster further development of the self concept, in that children have the opportunity to reflect on the continuities (as well as discontinuities) in their own and others’ reactions to events and experiences. In a variety of ways then, both indirectly and directly, conscious appreciation that the source of a representation is a past event contributes to increases in autobiographical memories.

Developments in Language and Narrative Expression

Because autobiographical memories are expressed verbally, developments in language and in narrative expression play a role in autobiographical memory development. In the first years of life, children who have larger vocabularies and more sophisticated syntax make more contributions to memory conversations relative to children with less developed language skills. Over the preschool years, children play increasingly active roles in conversations. For example, they provide (1) more of the elements of a complete narrative (i.e., the who, what, where, when, why, and how of events), (2) more descriptive details, and (3) more evaluative information, thereby adding texture to their narratives. A more complete narrative not only makes for a better story for the listener but also provides the storyteller with a structure for organizing memory representations, for differentiating events from one another, and for creating associative links between events. It thus works to facilitate encoding and consolidation of event memories in a way that simultaneously preserves their uniqueness and integrates them with other memories in long-term stores, thereby strengthening their representation. The organizational frame provided by a complete narrative also may aid memory retrieval.

The Social Context of Remembering

The development of autobiographical memory does not occur in a vacuum. From early in their lives, children participate in the activity of sharing their own and others’ memories. At first, much of the work of recollecting past experiences falls to more verbally and narratively accomplished partners, typically the children’s parents. Parents tell what happened in an event and children participate by affirming the parents’ contributions, and by adding a bit of memory content here and there. Through these conversations, children begin to learn what to include in their memory reports and also how to organize their narratives. As noted earlier, as they internalize the narrative form, it comes to serve important mnemonic functions at encoding as well as retrieval. Through conversations about past events, children also learn the social function of talking about the past, which is to share thoughts, feelings, reactions, and experiences with other people. Families or cultures that place a high premium on talking about the past, and on the child’s own experience of events, likely will promote more rapid development of structures for organizing autobiographical memories, relative to families and cultures that place less emphasis on these aspects of experience. These variables will interact with characteristics of the individual child, resulting in individual as well as group variation.

Variability among children. There are numerous individual differences that may affect the development of autobiographical memory. For example, there are individual differences in the most basic element of the self concept, namely, self-recognition. In the middle of the second year, ∼ 50% of children already indicate self-recognition. Whereas another 25% recognize themselves by the end of the second year, the remaining 25% still do not. A similar range is apparent on tasks that assess the temporally extended self. That is, at 3 years of age, 25% of children already show evidence of recognition that the past self and present self are one and the same. A full year later, 75% of children show this evidence but 25% still do not.

Individual differences also are apparent in many of the other domains that relate to developments in autobiographical memory, including (1) the amount that infants and children remember, (2) the accuracy of memories, (3) acquisition of temporal concepts that aid in location of events in time and in relation to one another, and (4) understanding of a variety of cognitive concepts that are hypothesized to relate to autonoetic awareness. Children also differ in their verbal and narrative sophistication and thus in their abilities to express their memories. These sources of variability have direct, indirect, and as described next, even interactive effects on autobiographical memory development.

Variability among families. Individual children bring their individual differences into home environments that themselves are variable. One of the ways that home environments differ is in the narrative style of the parents. For example, some mothers use a large number of evaluative terms in autobiographical memory conversations. Over time, their children come to use a larger number of such terms when they report on events. More broadly, some parents exhibit an elaborative style of talking about the past, providing cues and details about events and inviting their children to join in on the story. Other parents exhibit a more repetitive style, asking children questions for which they seem to have a particular answer in mind. Children exposed to the elaborative style report more about events both concurrently and over time. It seems that they are internalizing a narrative form that helps them organize, remember, and subsequently retrieve stories of previous life events. Importantly, parental style is, to a certain degree, a misnomer, in that characteristics of the child and even of the dyad influence it. For example, parents are more elaborative with children who are more verbal and with daughters relative to sons. The attachment security of the dyad also is related to parental style: mothers in securely attached dyads are more elaborative. Even family demographics may relate to autobiographical memory development. For instance, on tests of understanding of the representational nature of mind, a concept implicated in autobiographical memory, children who are first-born and thus have no older siblings have low rates of success. In sum, there are numerous differences among families that may affect the course of development of autobiographical memory in any given child.

Variability among cultures. Just as important as differences in the child who is doing the remembering and in the familial environment in which memory is being shaped are differences in the larger cultural milieu of experience. Illustrative examples come from research that involves contrasts between children from Eastern and Western culture groups. Briefly, the early autobiographical memory reports of children from Eastern cultures include fewer references to themselves and fewer personal evaluations, relative to reports from children in Western cultures. In addition, the autobiographical memory reports of children from Eastern cultures tend to feature generic as opposed to specific events, and they are shorter and less detailed, relative to those provided by children in the West. Thus, on at least three critical features – significance to the self, specificity in place and time, and verbal expression – the early narratives of children from Eastern cultures may be viewed as less prototypically autobiographical, relative to the narratives of children from Western cultures.

Linking Autobiographical Memory Development and Infantile or Childhood Amnesia

If, over the course of infancy and the preschool years, memories of events appear more and more autobiographical, why then do adults have so few personal memories from this period? Addressing this question requires consideration of the rate at which autobiographical memories are formed and the complementary rate at which they are forgotten. Although the preschool years are marked by an increasing rate of formation of event memories with autobiographical features, they also are marked by a rate of forgetting that is accelerated, relative to the rate of forgetting in later childhood and adulthood. At some point, the rate at which new, more autobiographical memories are formed overtakes the rate at which they are forgotten. From adults’ retrospective perspective, that point is the offset of infantile or childhood amnesia.

The Rate at Which Memories Are Formed

There is incontrovertible evidence that over the course of the preschool years, children form memories that are more and more autobiographical. As early as they are able to use past tense markers, children refer to past events of relevance to themselves. As they gain in narrative sophistication, children’s stories become more complete and more coherent. Their narratives about past events also take on more and more elements of drama and they contain an increasing amount of evidence of the significance of the event for the child. Stories are told not only about routine events but about unique experiences that happened at a particular place, at a particular time. Some events – though certainly not all – are remembered for months and even years. Although prior to 4–6 years of age children do not pass tasks that permit researchers to say that they are aware of the sources of their representations, children’s narratives certainly contain evidence of vivid recollections of events from the past: they include elements that provide a sense of the intensity of experience, elements of suspense, and information about the internal states of the participants, for example. In sum, over the course of the preschool years, children’s stories of their lives bear more and more of the marks of typical autobiographical reports. As a result, children exhibit an increasing number of memories that are recognized as autobiographical.

The Rate at Which Memories Are Forgotten

Even infants and young children remember, but they also forget. The younger the infant or the child, the faster the rate of forgetting. Age-related differential forgetting results from a number of sources. One source is the relative immaturity of the neural structures responsible for formation and maintenance of memories over the long term. Because the temporal cortical network is relatively less developed, encoding and consolidation processes are less effective and efficient in younger infants and children than in older children. As a result, they exhibit a faster rate of forgetting.

Differential rates of forgetting also likely result from several nonmnemonic sources. In effect, the memories that the young child is asking her or his immature brain to consolidate and store contain fewer of the features that typify autobiographical memories: (1) the self to which they are referenced is not as stable and coherent a construct as it will be later in development; (2) relative to later memories, early memories tend to contain fewer distinctive features and are less specifically located in space and time; (3) younger children likely encode fewer of the elements that make for a good narrative, relative to older children, thereby denying themselves an effective organizational tool; and (4) early-memory representations contain fewer indications of their origin in events from the past, relative to those encoded with a more mature understanding of the representational nature of the human mind. In short, in early childhood we have less than optimal processes operating on less than optimal raw materials. The quality of the resulting output is simply not as high as it is in later childhood and adulthood, when we have more optimal processes operating on more optimal materials. The net result is a faster rate of forgetting. Importantly, this analysis implies that the rate of forgetting is not accelerated as suggested by the second component of the definition of infantile or childhood amnesia. That is, the analysis implies that the number of memories of events from the ages of 3 to 7 years is not smaller than would be expected based on forgetting alone. That characterization holds only when an adult rate of forgetting is applied. Consideration of a more developmentally appropriate rate of forgetting is expected to yield a more normal distribution.

The Crossover of Two Functions

The net effect of this analysis is a model that suggests that, among adults, we see an increase in autobiographical memories dating from around age 4 to 6 years because, as depicted in Figure 3, this is the point at which the functions of memory formation (ascending solid line) and memory loss (descending solid line) cross over. Prior to the age of 4 years, the rate at which memories are lost is faster than the rate at which they are gained; after the age of 6 years, the rate at which memories are formed is faster than the rate at which they are lost. Considering the adult phenomenon of childhood amnesia to be a result of the crossover of two functions provides a ready account of individual and group differences in the age of, and distribution of, autobiographical memories from early in life. Two individuals who as children had the same rate of forgetting may nevertheless have vastly different offsets of childhood amnesia as a function of differences in the slopes of change in the remembering function. Children in a family and cultural environment that places a premium on narrative, and that encourages reflection on the meanings of events and their significance for the child, may have autobiographical memories from earlier in the preschool years (dashed line crossing at age 4 years). In contrast, children in a family and cultural environment that uses a less elaborative style and which does not encourage reflection on the self may have autobiographical memories from later in the preschool years (dotted line crossing at age 6 years).

Figure 3 Schematic representation of the crossover in the preschool years of the functions of memory formation (the rate of which increases with age; solid ascending line) and memory loss (the rate of which decreases with age; solid descending line). The period of intersection between ages 4 and 6 years is recognized as the offset of infantile or childhood amnesia. Also illustrated are possible patterns of individual differences in the offset of infantile amnesia as a function of differences in the slope of change of the remembering function. The dashed line represents a steeper increase in the memory function and an earlier crossover with forgetting (at age 4 years). The dotted line represents a more shallow increase in the memory function and a later crossover with forgetting (at age 6 years).

Individual differences also could result from differences in the slopes of forgetting functions (not shown in Figure 3). That is, individuals whose rates of increase in the formation of autobiographical memories are the same could nevertheless experience a different course of development of autobiographical memory because of differences in the rate at which memories are forgotten. Variability in the forgetting function no doubt is associated with a variety of factors, including different rates of maturational change in the temporal cortical network and associated differences in the basic mnemonic processes of encoding, consolidation, storage, and retrieval. As such, the conceptualization provides a ready account of individual and cultural differences: they result from differences in the quality of the autobiographical memories that are formed during the period and from the likelihood of survival of the memories over time.

Summary and Conclusions

Whereas adults have a wealth of memories from later childhood and early adulthood, there is a virtually universal paucity of memories from the first years of life. For over a century, there have been reports that the average age of earliest memory among Western adults is age 3–3.5 years. Adults report a larger and gradually increasing number of memories from the ages of 3 to 7 years. The number of events adults remember from the age of 7 years onward is consistent with what would be expected, based on adult rates of forgetting.

From a theoretical standpoint, this distribution of autobiographical memories is interesting and important because of its implications for the self concept. For much of the lifetime there is a continuous time line of events and experiences. The boundary of childhood amnesia represents a break in the otherwise continuous history and thus a challenge to a fully integrated sense of self. Infantile or childhood amnesia also is interesting and important because of its clinical and forensic implications. Theories of personality and psychopathology look to early experiences as an important source of adult attitudes and behaviors. For these analyses, determination of the nature of the trace that early experiences leave behind is crucial. Forensic concerns also compel research on memory for events during the period obscured by childhood amnesia. The veridicality and accessibility of memories of events from early in life are questions the answers to which can have profound consequences for childhood victims of crimes, as well as their alleged perpetrators.

The fact that the phenomenon of childhood amnesia is almost universal does not mean that there are no individual and group differences in early memory. On the contrary, there is wide variation in the age of earliest memory, and there are differences as a function of gender, birth order, and culture group. Theories that hope to explain the relative lack among adults of memories of specific events from early in life must account not only for the age of earliest memory and distribution of early memories, but for these systematic sources of individual and group variability as well.

Theories to explain infantile or childhood amnesia have suggested either that memories for early life events are formed but then later become inaccessible, or that memories are not accessible later in life because they were never formed. Although these explanations may seem incompatible, it is likely that elements of both figure in the development of autobiographical memory and thus the offset of childhood amnesia. Consideration of age-related developments in the neural substrate of autobiographical memory, in the processes that it subserves, and in a number of nonmnemonic concepts and domains (including language), implies that, in infancy and the preschool years, memories are formed but that they are relatively quickly forgotten. Conversely, developments in all of these domains imply that, over the same period of time, the memories that are formed are increasingly autobiographical. The point at which the two functions – rate of forgetting and rate of remembering – cross over one another is the point that we recognize as the offset of infantile or childhood amnesia. The crossover point varies as a function of individual differences in children, in their families, and even in the culture group in which they are raised. This analysis makes infantile or childhood amnesia less enigmatic. At the same time, it makes additional research on the processes and determinants of remembering and forgetting in infancy, early childhood, and beyond, all the more imperative.

See also: Birth Order; Cognitive Development; Memory.

Suggested Readings

Bauer PJ. Event memory. In: Damon W, Lerner RM, eds. Handbook of Child Psychology: Cognition, Perception, and Language. 6th edn. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley; 2006a: 373–425.

Bauer PJ. Remembering the Times of Our Lives: Memory in Infancy and Beyond. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum; 2006b.

Brewer WF. What is recollective memory?. In: Rubin DC, ed. Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1996: 19–66.

Markowitsch HJ. Neuroanatomy of memory. In: Tulving E, Craik FIM, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Memory. New York: Oxford University Press; 2000: 465– 484.

Mullen MK. Earliest recollections of childhood: A demographic analysis. Cognition. 1994; 52: 55–79.

Nelson CA, Thomas KM, de Haan M. Neural bases of cognitive development. In: Damon W, Lerner RM, eds. Handbook of Child Psychology, Vol. 2: Cognition, Perception, and Language. 6th edn. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley; 2006: 3– 57.

Nelson K, Fivush R. The emergence of autobiographical memory: A social cultural developmental theory. Psychological Review. 2004; 111: 486–511.

Rubin DC. The distribution of early childhood memories. Memory. 2000; 8: 265–269.

Wang Q. Infantile amnesia reconsidered: A cross-cultural analysis. Memory. 2003; 11: 65–80.

Wetzler SE, Sweeney JA. Childhood amnesia: An empirical demonstration. In: Rubin DC, ed. Autobiographical Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press; 1986: 191–201.

Artistic Development

C. Golomb    University of Massachusetts, Boston, Boston, MA, USA

Glossary

Divergent perspective   Lines that depict the edges of an object by diverging rather than converging on a vanishing point.

Frontal plane   The plane lying perpendicular to the viewer’s line of sight.

Globals  

A circle or oblong with facial features that represent the human figure.

Intellectual realism   The child draws what he knows, not what he sees.

Linear perspective   Lines that represent the edges of an object in a scene that converge on a single point, called the vanishing point near the back of the center.

Representation  

The ability to evoke mentally the image of an absent object and give it form in drawing or modeling.

Synthetic incapacity   The young preschool child’s inability to coordinate the parts of a figure into a coherent drawing.

Tadpole figure   The global human sprouts arms and legs.

Viewpoint  

The notional position occupied by a monocular viewer in relation to a scene (Willats).

Introduction

Representational development in drawing and sculpture examines the evolution of forms that can stand for the objects in a scene. Representation is a mental activity of symbol formation concerned with creating forms of equivalence in a given medium. Unlike imitation of reality which aims for a one-to-one correspondence to its referent, artistic representation implies finding structural equivalents for the referent. Its development documents the manner in which young children invent simple, economical forms and the processes of differentiation that lead to a more effective depiction. This development is orderly and rule governed, universal in its early phases that encompass phenotypical diversity on basic structural equivalents.

Children’s Drawings

For over 100 years, psychologists and educators have shown a fascination with children’s drawings, an interest that dates from the latter part of the nineteenth century and coincides with the beginnings of a systematic psychological study of child development. The first publications of children’s drawings stem from this period, suggestive of later stage theories of mental development. The topic of child art subsumes drawing, painting, and modeling, but given the easy access to paper, pencils, and magic markers, drawings have been most widely studied.

Child art, which emerges in the early preschool years, is a symbolic activity that is unique to human beings. Nonhuman primates such as the great apes are able to recognize photographs and line drawings of familiar objects, but despite extensive training in the use of symbols, they do not create the simple representational forms that most 3-year-old children spontaneously draw and name. It is an amazing accomplishment of the human child to create, without training, these first representational shapes for which there are no readily available models (see Figures 1(a) and 1(b)). These early representations comprised of a large circle with facial features and legs are simple but recognizable representations of a human or an animal.

Figure 1 (a) Global humans. (b) Tadpole figure. (c) Open trunk figures. (d) Figures with a graphically differentiated torso. (e) Tadpole animal.

Psychologists who at the end of the nineteenth century set out to study children’s drawings were faced with the peculiarities of child art. Young children’s drawings appeared bizarre and they were puzzled by the omission of significant features, their frequent displacement, the lack of proportion and perspective, mixed views, the arbitrary use of colors, the transparencies of features not visible to an observer, and many other faults. Concluding that the drawings of the young were indicative of a conceptually immature mind, they studied the changes in children’s drawings as an index of the growth of intelligence. Over the next decades, many extensive cross-sectional and longitudinal studies were undertaken with the intention to chronicle the stages in graphic development and their anticipated progression toward a realistic representation. With Florence Goodenough’s Draw-a-Man test published in Measurement of Intelligence by Drawings (1926), drawings of the human figure were standardized and scored according to the number of parts depicted and the realism of some of the features that were assumed to correspond to the child’s conceptual maturity or intelligence quotient (IQ). This test of intelligence became a widely used instrument that was restandardized by Dale Harris in 1963.

A different conception of child art was held by the modernist artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Artists and art educators organized the first exhibitions of child art and often displayed their own work along with the drawings and paintings of children. Artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gabriele Münter, and Pablo Picasso appreciated the spontaneity and esthetics of children’s drawings and paintings; they considered the language of child art an authentic expression of a creative mind unencumbered by social conventions.

These contrasting approaches to child art and its development have found further elaboration in the writings of Jean Piaget and Rudolf Arnheim both of whom have had a profound impact on research in this field.

Jean Piaget, in his influential book co-authored with Bärbel Inhelder The Child ’s Construction of Space (1956), proposes to view drawing development in distinct stages that correspond to the stages of spatial-mathematical reasoning. The first stage pertains to the preschool years; the child draws closed shapes that differentiate the figure from its background but ignores the true shape and size of the object they represent. These drawings are based on topological relations that distinguish the inside from the outside of a form, and the manner in which they are connected. Only gradually are children able to order the various parts of the figure, and the difficulty in organizing the major parts of a figure into a coherent representation Piaget terms synthetic incapacity. Piaget relates this phase of drawing to the early preoperational period of cognitive development (ages 3–4 years). The next stage sees progress in the differentiation of parts of a figure and the adoption of more varied forms that are also better organized. Following the art historian George Henry Luquet who provided a longitudinal account of his daughter’s drawing development, Piaget calls this phase intellectual realism (ages 5–7 years). This term signifies that the drawing child has a better conception of the object he or she is representing although the resemblance to the model remains crude and the perspective of the observer is ignored. This phase is often described as ‘the child draws what he knows, not what he sees’. During the concrete operational period of cognitive development (ages 8–11 years), visual realism becomes the dominant form of drawing. Children now consider their viewing point when drawing, and their intuitive understanding of Euclidean concepts of measurement and of projective geometry lead to a more realistic depiction of a scene. New techniques appear for the depiction of depth and volume, experimentation now leads to the use of occlusion of parts hidden from view and to size diminution, and eventually to the use of perspective. By the end of the concrete operational period children are supposed to have made progress toward optical realism in their drawings, a highly valued endpoint in drawing development.

Rudolf Arnheim in his influential book Art and Visual Perception published in 1974 provides a new perspective on the psychology of art. On