ABSTRACT
Although infantile amnesia has been known about for many years, it is not easy to investigate. One problem is identifying events that are of importance to a child, events that can be precisely dated and verifi ed by a third party. The birth of a brother or sister falls into this category, and has been investigated in a number of studies. In one experiment college students and children aged 4, 6, 8, and 12 were asked to recall the birth of a brother or sister when they were between 3 and 11 years old. They were asked questions such as ‘Who took care of you while your mother was in hospital?’, ‘Did the baby receive presents?’, ‘Did you receive presents?’, and so on. The mothers were asked the same questions. The study, illustrated in Fig. 12.1 , found surprisingly little forgetting regardless of time since the event, but there was a clear age effect. Children under 3 at the time remembered virtually nothing, while 3-to 5-year-olds recalled almost as much as older children. In short, the phenomenon of infantile amnesia was confi rmed (Sheingold & Tenney, 1982).
