12 Memory
Learning Objectives
- Describe the characteristics of infant memory.
- Discuss the impact of aging on memory
Would you still be yourself if you didn’t remember what happened to you yesterday? The longer our lives progress, the more of our past we need to remember (or wish to forget). Our ability to remember what happened to us is crucial to our ability to conceptualize ourselves, and in that way, our memories are fundamental to who we are. However, we experience changes to our memories throughout our lives. This section will highlight how memories are typically not remembered from early life, and also how memory changes in old age lead to not only questions about who we are, but how one can go about their activities of daily living.
Memory During Infancy and Childhood
Memory requires the capacity to mentally represent experience, so it should not be surprising that infant memory is rather fleeting and fragile. As a result, older children and adults experience infantile amnesia (sometimes called childhood amnesia), the inability to recall memories from the first few years of life. Several hypotheses have been proposed for this amnesia. From the biological perspective, it has been suggested that infantile amnesia is due to the immaturity of the infant brain, especially those areas that are crucial to the formation of autobiographical memory, such as the hippocampus. From the cognitive perspective, it has been suggested that the lack of linguistic skills of babies and toddlers limit their ability to mentally represent events; thereby, reducing their ability to encode memory. Moreover, even if infants do form such early memories, older children and adults may not be able to access them because they may be employing very different, more linguistically based, retrieval cues than infants used when forming largely photographic or visual memories. Finally, social theorists argue that episodic memories of personal experiences may hinge on an understanding of “self”, something that is clearly lacking in infants and young toddlers.
However, in a series of clever studies Carolyn Rovee-Collier and her colleagues have demonstrated that infants can remember events from their life, even if these memories are short-lived. Three-month-old infants were taught that they could make a mobile hung over their crib shake by kicking their legs. The infants were placed in their crib, on their backs. A ribbon was tied to one foot and the other end to a mobile. At first infants made random movements, but then came to realize that by kicking they could make the mobile shake. After two 9-minute sessions with the mobile, the mobile was removed. One week later the mobile was reintroduced to one group of infants and most of the babies immediately started kicking their legs, indicating that they remembered their prior experience with the mobile. A second group of infants was shown the mobile two weeks later, and the babies made only random movements. The memory had faded