What causes childhood amnesia?

Flashbulb memory

Highly confident personal memories of surprising events. To study them researchers have focused on public tragedies.

Pruning

Elimination of unused neurons and synaptic connections. Frontal lobes: not fully developed until 25.

Repression

In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.

Self-concept

Our understanding and evaluation of who we are. In the study childhood amnesia it is the view that the lack of development of a psychological self is the cause of childhood amnesia. Because children do not have a working self which to associate episodic memories, our earliest memories may feel fragmented. A child's self-concept begins to develop at 18 months, yet continues to mature as the child enters their 3rd or 4th year. Once this self-concept has been developed more appropriately, can episodic memories be stored in a way to be retrieved later.

Childhood amnesia

Refers to the observation that adults have almost no episodic memories from the first 3 to 5 years of their lives. Because childhood amnesia has been difficult to research experimentally, psychologist have resorted to explaining childhood amnesia in 4 different ways: The psychodynamic view, age related changes in self-concept, neurological maturation, and language development.

Neurological maturation

The view that childhood amnesia is caused by changes in the brain as it matures. This view argues the neural structures needed for forming episodic memories are not fully mature until a child reaches the age of 3, thus these memories cannot be maintained. However, because areas such as the frontal lobe continue to mature into adolescence, this theory cannot account for childhood amnesia.

Language development

The view that childhood amnesia is caused by the growth of language ability in the young child. Language provides the structure and narrative schemas necessary to support episodic memories. Some evidence to support this are that women develop linguistically earlier than men do, regardless of gender those with stronger linguistic ability at the age of 3 or 4 can recall events at that age later in childhood, and that information that is encoded in nonverbal forms cannot later be converted into verbal form.

Magic Shrinking Machine

Was a machine developed by Simcock and Hayne (2002) which supported the importance of language development in childhood amnesia. What they did was present children between the ages of 3 and 4 this machine by placing a beach ball on top of the machine and as it dropped to the bottom a smaller beach ball would emerge. Then they would test the vebal abilities of the children by seeing if they knew the words that described the shrunken objects. They would then track the children a year later to see if they would remember the machine and what they saw. What they found was that the children who knew for example the word beach ball were able to remember the beach ball. The same happened when they tracked them down 6 years later. This results of this experiment support the idea that language is critical to the offset of childhood amnesia.

Psychodynamic view

Was a theory developed by Freud that views childhood amnesia as being caused by active repression. He considered that memories in early childhood were repressed because it was a period of sexual thinking, thus these thoughts are blocked by the subconscious for the first 5 to 6 years of life. Freud stated that these thoughts are not completely lost, and can be tapped into through psychoanalysis.