ABSTRACT
Infantile amnesia is a phenomenon easily appreciated because of our common difficulty in remembering events from early childhood. In practical terms, reference is to forgetting after a very long interval between infancy and adult hood. It may appear somewhat trivial to add that this interval encompasses the period of physiological and behavioral development from an immature to a mature organism, but the point probably cannot be overemphasized. The critical feature for infantile amnesia is that forgetting during this period is greater than that during a similar retention interval that does not begin until after the organism is mature. For instance, whereas a 20-year-old person would be quite unable to remember specific events accompanying her birth in a hospital, a 40-year-old can remember without difficulty a good deal about her stay in the hospital during an illness 20 years earlier; the greater forgetting for the infantile experience over the common 20-year duration defines “ infantile amnesia.”
