Childhood Amnesia

Childhood amnesia, also called infantile amnesia, is the inability of most adults to retrieve episodic memories from before roughly the age of three to four years, along with a relative sparsity of memories through approximately age seven. The phenomenon was first described systematically by Sigmund Freud, though his psychoanalytic explanation has been superseded by cognitive and neurological accounts pointing to the ongoing development of the hippocampus and of language and self-concept in early childhood, which together shape the ability to encode and later retrieve autobiographical memories. Research using diary studies and later recall of documented early-childhood events has helped establish the typical age range and the gradual rather than sudden onset of reliable long-term autobiographical memory.