Childhood amnesia

Infantile amnesia refers to the phenomenon in psychology that most adults can not recall events that have occurred before the age of three.

Possible reasons

There are, depending on various assumptions Assuming a theory for this phenomenon:

• Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud brought this action in the context of displacement. This assumption contradicts, however, that not only negative memories, but all the memories are forgotten.
• Brain maturation: The data necessary for conscious memory brain structures are not yet fully developed ( Schachter, Moscovitch, 1984) at birth. These include subcortical limbic- diencephalic structures that are fully mature until the age of 2 to 3 years (disputed ) and neocortical areas (eg in the inferotemporal cortex) ( McKeeund, Squire, 1993)
• Encoding: Early memories are only as actions or sensations encoded. They are later no longer available because it in a different format than subsequent memories (mainly language ) were saved ( Howe, Courage, 1993)
• From about the 2nd year of life, the infant developed an independent personality ( it recognizes itself in a mirror). His experience is as of this date is stored as personal experiences I ( Me, my hand, my mom ... ). If the ego - consciousness is fully developed, is remembered not aware of earlier experiences that are not I - encoded ( as they are stored without ICH code in memory). ( Kinseher, 2008)
• Development of the knowledge structures ( Fivush, Hammond, 1990): Infantile amnesia is based according to this assumption on the absence of distinctive call stimuli and on the fact that young children have yet to acquire frame structures to retell events and incorporate it into their memory. So little kids focus on the similarities between the events, but this is bad adapted to facilitate the retrieval later. In addition, they do not yet have their own frameworks to construct memories. For this reason, these early memories are fragmented, making it difficult to retrieve later. Infantile amnesia is thus explained by the aim to the formation of scripts and forgetting from falling out of the ordinary events.