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Infantile Amnesia

What do you remember about your life before you were three? Few people can remember anything that

happened to them in their early years. Adults' memories of the next few years also tend to be scanty. Most people

remember only a few events—usually ones that were meaningful and distinctive, such as being hospitalized or a

sibling’s birth.  

How might this inability to recall early experiences be explained? The sheer （complete / transparent / translucent ）passage of time 時間的流逝does not account無法闡述清楚

for it; adults have excellent recog5nition of pictures of peoplewho attended high school with them 35 years earlier.

Another seemingly plausible explanation—that infants do not form enduring memories at this point in

development—also is incorrect. Children two and a half to three years old remember experiences that occurred in

their first year, and eleven month olds remember some events a year later. Nor does the hypothesis that infantile

amnesia reflects repression—or holding back—of sexually charged episodes explain the phenomenon. While such

repression may occur, people cannot remember ordinary events from the infant and toddler periods either.

Charged : fraught with great emotion

Three other explanations seem more promising. One involves physiological changes relevant to memory.

Maturation of the frontal lobes of the brain continues throughout early childhood, and this part of the brain may

be critical for remembering particular episodes in ways that can be retrieved later. Demonstrations of infants’ and

toddlers' long-term memory have involved their repeating motor activities that they had seen or done earlier,

such as reaching in the dark for objects, putting a bottle in a doll’s mouth, or pulling apart two pieces of a toy. The

brain’s level of physiological maturation may support these types of memories, but not ones requiring explicit

verbal descriptions.  

physiological

adj. pertaining to the function of body parts

psychological

adj. of psychology; of the mind, of mental and emotional conditions

motor: 5.

Involving or relating to movements of the muscles:

肌肉運動的：涉及或有關肌肉運動的：

motor coordination; a motor reflex.

A second explanation involves the influence of the social world on children’s language use. Hearing and

telling stories about events may help children store information in ways that will endure into later childhood and

adulthood. Through hearing stories with a clear beginning, middle, and ending children may learn to extract the

gist of events in ways that they will be able to describe many years later. Consistent with this view, parents and

children increasingly engage in discussions of past events when children are about three years old. However,

hearing such stories is not sufficient for younger children to form enduring memories. Telling such stories to two

year olds does not seem to produce long-lasting verbalizable memories.

A third likely explanation for infantile amnesia involves incompatibilities between the ways in which infants

encode information and the ways in which older children and adults retrieve it. Whether people can remember an

event depends critically on the fit between the way in which they earlier encoded the information and the way in

which they later attempt to retrieve it. The better able the person is to reconstruct the perspective from which the

material was encoded, the more likely that recall will be successful.  

This view is supported by a variety of factors that can create mismatches between very young children's

encoding and older children's and adults' retrieval efforts. The world looks very different to a person whose head

is only two or three feet above the ground than to one whose head is five or six feet above it. Older children and

adults often try to retrieve the names of things they saw, but infants would not have encoded the information

verbally. General knowledge of categories of events such as a birthday party or a visit to the doctor's office helps

older individuals encode their experiences, but again, infants and toddlers are unlikely to encode many

experiences within such knowledge structures.

These three explanations of infantile amnesia are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they support each other.

Physiological immaturity may be part of why infants and toddlers do not form extremely enduring memories,

even when they hear stories that promote such remembering in preschoolers. Hearing the stories may lead

preschoolers to encode aspects of events that allow them to form memories they can access as adults. Conversely

improved encoding of what they hear may help them better understand and remember stories and thus make the

stories more useful for remembering future events. Thus, all three explanations—physiological maturation,

hearing and producing stories about past events, and improved encoding of key aspects of events—seem likely t

be involved in overcoming infantile amnesia.

Infantile Amnesia

What do you remember about your  life before you were three? Few people can remember anything that

happened to them in their early years. Adults' memories of the next few years also tend to be scanty. Most people

remember only a few events—usually ones that were meaningful and distinctive, such as being hospitalized or a

sibling’s birth.  

How might this inability to recall early experiences be explained? The sheer （complete / transparent / translucent ）passage of time 時間的流逝does not account無法闡述清楚

for it; adults have excellent recog5nition of pictures of peoplewho attended high school with them 35 years earlier.

Another seemingly plausible explanation—that infants do not form enduring memories at this point in

development—also is incorrect. Children two and a half to three years old remember experiences that occurred in

their first year, and eleven month olds remember some events a year later. Nor does the hypothesis that infantile

amnesia reflects repression—or holding back—of sexually charged episodes explain the phenomenon. While such

repression may occur, people cannot remember ordinary  events from the infant and toddler periods either. 

 Charged : fraught with great emotion

Three other explanations seem more promising. One involves physiological changes relevant to memory.

Maturation of the frontal lobes of the brain continues throughout early childhood, and this part of the brain may

be critical for remembering particular episodes in ways that can be retrieved later. Demonstrations of infants’ and

toddlers' long-term memory have involved their repeating motor activities that they had seen or done earlier,

such as reaching in the dark for objects, putting a bottle in a doll’s mouth, or pulling apart two pieces of a toy. The

brain’s level of physiological maturation may support these types of memories, but not ones requiring explicit

verbal descriptions.  

 physiological

adj. pertaining to the function of body parts

psychological

adj. of psychology; of the mind, of mental and emotional conditions

 motor: 5.

Involving or relating to movements of the muscles:

肌肉運動的：涉及或有關肌肉運動的：

motor coordination; a motor reflex.

A second explanation  involves the influence of the social world on children’s language use. Hearing and

telling stories about events may help children store information in ways that will endure into later childhood and

adulthood. Through hearing stories with a clear beginning, middle, and ending children may learn to extract the

gist of events in ways that they will be able to describe many years later. Consistent with this view, parents and

children increasingly engage in discussions of past events when children are about three years old. However,

hearing such stories is not sufficient for younger children to form enduring memories. Telling such stories to two

year olds does not seem to produce long-lasting verbalizable memories.

A third likely explanation for infantile amnesia involves incompatibilities between the ways in which infants

encode information and the ways in which older children and adults retrieve it. Whether people can remember an

event depends critically on the fit between the way in which they earlier encoded the information and the way in

which they later attempt to retrieve it. The better able the person is to reconstruct the perspective from which the

material was encoded, the more likely that recall will be successful.  

This view is supported by a variety of factors that can create mismatches between very young children's

encoding and older children's and adults' retrieval efforts. The world looks very different to a person whose head

is only two or three feet above the ground than to one whose head is five or six feet above it. Older children and

adults often try to retrieve the names of things they saw, but infants would not have encoded the information

verbally. General knowledge of categories of events such as a birthday party or a visit to the doctor's office helps

older individuals encode their experiences, but again, infants and toddlers are unlikely to encode many

experiences within such knowledge structures.

These three explanations of infantile amnesia are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they support each other.

Physiological immaturity may be part of why infants and toddlers do not form extremely enduring memories,

even when they hear stories that promote such remembering in preschoolers. Hearing the stories may lead

preschoolers to encode aspects of events that allow them to form memories they can access as adults. Conversely

improved encoding of what they hear may help them better understand and remember stories and thus make the

stories more useful for remembering future events. Thus, all three  explanations—physiological maturation,

hearing and producing stories about past events, and improved encoding of key aspects of events—seem likely t

be involved in overcoming infantile amnesia.