Sigmund Freud called it ‘the remarkable amnesia of childhood’¹. When you ask people to recall their earliest experiences, they rarely report memories dating from much before about three years of age. Since Freud made his observations, the phenomenon of childhood amnesia has been the subject of much research and theorizing, with many different explanations put forward to explain this intriguing phenomenon. One possibility is that early experiences are not properly encoded, which means that they cannot be stored for later retrieval. The problem with this explanation is that we know from other research (and casual observation) that memory processes are functional in infancy and early childhood. The issue is not with children remembering things, but with them continuing to do so when they reach adulthood.

Why do adults suffer from this forgetfulness? One response might be that it’s not adults that we should be asking. Some recent studies have shown that, if you ask the question in childhood, you get an earlier point of ‘offset’ of childhood amnesia—that is, the respondents’ earliest memories seem to go back further. To test this idea out some more, Karen Tustin and Harlene Hayne at the University of Otago have taken a new approach to the subject. In their study, published in the last issue of Developmental Psychology², they recruited four groups of participants: young children (age 5), older children (age 8-9), adolescents (age 12-13), and adults (age 18-20). There were twelve people in each group, with equal numbers of males and females. For each participant, the researchers created what they call a Timeline: a horizontal line depicting different years of the individual’s life, with photos of the participant attached at some of the ages…