ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at childhood amnesia, what small babies can remember, different memory skills at different ages in childhood, and how memories make up our identity. Organisms need less of a brain than used to be thought necessary to have functioning memory. The main components of working memory are an articulatory loop, in which words and sounds are stored for up to two seconds, and the visuo-spatialsketch pad, which stores and manipulates images for again a matter of seconds. Procedural memory is remembering the correct sequences of a process, hence procedural. E. R. Flavell and Henry Wellman showed that children tended to overestimate their own memory and to ignore the kind of mnemonic tricks people use in order to recall things effectively. Physiological studies of adult memory are interesting, and point to the importance of areas in the brain like the hippocampus and the amygdala in processing memory.
