ABSTRACT
Childhood amnesia (termed “infantile amnesia” by Freud, 1905/1953) is a phenomenon that has intrigued people for a very long time, and investigations of it began more than a century ago (Henri & Henri, 1898; Miles, 1895). Originally it was thought to be a barrier that prevented access to all memories of events that occurred prior to between 3 and 4 years of age. However, it is also applied to the phenomenon of memory scarcity for events occurring in the preschool and early school years, before around age 6–7 (Bauer, 2007; Nelson & Fivush, 2004). Thus, even after the memory identified by someone as their “first,” later memories of early childhood are few in number and typically impoverished or fragmentary in comparison to later memories (Bruce, Phillips-Grant, Wilcox-O’Hearn, Robinson, & Francis, 2007). Nonetheless, most research has focused on the memory that individuals provide when asked for their earliest. In this chapter, I briefly review research on the earliest memories of adults before turning to research on children’s earliest memories. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal research findings on children’s early memories are reviewed as well as research that suggests the presence of systematic dating errors. Finally, some theoretical considerations are discussed.
