ABSTRACT
John Kihlstrom and Judith Harackiewicz’s (1982) observations about children’s autobiographical records should by now sound quite familiar. Indeed in this single statement, the authors captured both components of the phenomenon of childhood amnesia. The most “famous” component of the amnesia is the relative paucity among adults of verbally accessible memories from the first 3 years of life. The second and less frequently discussed component is the smaller than expected number of memories from the ages of roughly 3 to 7 or 8 years (the pattern is captured in the schematic presented in Fig. 2.1). What is striking about Kihlstrom and Harackiewicz’s observation is not their comment on both components of childhood amnesia, however, but that they made it in reference to children’s autobiographical records, not adults’. Interestingly, the article in which their statement appeared was written before research on children’s recall of the experiences of their lives had gotten underway in earnest (as discussed in chap. 7, systematic studies of children’s recall of specific past events began to appear in the mid-to late 1980s). Moreover, it was made without reference to any research with children!—the authors provided no citation for the source of their observations, and not 1 of the 37 references in the article was of research focused on the memories of human children (although some research on the ontogeny of memory in nonhuman animals was cited).
