ABSTRACT
When adults are asked to report their earliest personal experiences, most can recall little about events that occurred prior to the age of 3 or 4. The absence of memories for our infancy and early childhood is commonly referred to as infantile or childhood amnesia. The pervasive finding that our early life is veiled from recollection raises fundamental questions about the continuity of memory processing across the life span. Are there major qualitative changes in memory processing across the first few years of life? If so, what are they and when do they occur? If not, how can we account for the phenomenon of childhood amnesia?
