Childhood amnesia, or childhood amnesia, is the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories before the age of two to four years, as well as the period before age 10 when adults retain fewer memories than would be expected given the passage of time. Some believe that the development of cognitive ability has an effect on the encoding and storage of early memories. Some research has shown that children can remember events from as early as one year old, but these memories may decline as children get older. Most psychologists disagree on the definition of compensation for childhood amnesia. Some define it as the age at which the first memory can be retrieved. This is usually around age three or four, but it can range from two to eight years. Changes in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories during early childhood are all important when considering childhood amnesia. Childhood amnesia was first formally reported by psychologist Caroline Miles in her article, “A Study of Individual Psychology,” in 1895 in the American Journal of Psychology. Five years later, Henry and Henry published a survey that showed that most of the earliest memories for most respondents occurred between the ages of two and four. In In 1904, G. Stanley Hall noted this phenomenon in his book, Adolescence: Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. In 1910, Sigmund Freud provided one of the most famous and controversial descriptions and explanations of childhood amnesia. Using psychoanalytic theory, he hypothesized that early life events had been repressed because of their inappropriate sexual nature. He asserted that childhood amnesia was a precursor to the “hysterical amnesia” or repression of memories presented by his adult patients. Freud asked his patients to recall their earliest memories and found that they had difficulty recalling events before the ages of six to eight. Freud coined the term “infancy amnesia” and discussed the phenomenon in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In 1972, Campbell and Speer published a seminal review of childhood amnesia in psychological science that summarized the research that had been done to understand this topic from a neurological and behavioral perspective in both human and animal models. The way a memory is retrieved can influence what can be Retrieval. Specifically, whether the individual is asked to recall a specific event, given more general instructions, or asked to recall any possible memory, the cueing method produces different results. Many studies use cuing to retrieve memories. In its basic form, the experimenter gives the participant a word, and the participant responds with the first memory they can think of associated with that word. This method has generally estimated the age of displacement to be around three to five but can vary. However, there are several objections to the cueing method. One memory is recorded for each cue word, so it can be difficult to know whether this memory is their oldest memory or the first memory that came to mind. This can be problematic if participants are not asked to record the earliest memory they can remember that is related to the cue. If the experimenter asks the participant to use childhood memories specifically or early memories associated with a cue, the age estimate can range from two to eight years. Even with this procedure, cued recall is only useful for recalling memories that were formed several months after the word entered the participant’s vocabulary. One study by Bauer and Larkina (2013) used cuing The guidance is by asking children and adults to recall a personal memory related to the word in question and then to indicate the earliest time it occurred. The researchers found that younger children needed more prompts or cues. However, for both children and adults, the first memory recall was around three years of age. Free recall refers to the specific model in the psychological study of memory in which participants study a list of items in a given experiment and are then asked to recall the items in any order. Free recall, in relation to childhood amnesia, is the process by which experimenters ask individuals for their earliest memories and allow participants to respond freely. There is little difference when people are asked to recall their earliest memories with cued recall compared to free recall. However, it is thought that the main advantage of free recall is that each question is answered, which in turn may lead to the recall of memories from an earlier age. In the exhaustive recall method, participants are asked to list all the memories they have access to before a certain age. This method, like free recall, relies on participants to form memories without cues. Exhaustive recall yields a better understanding than others of how many memories have survived from early childhood, but It can be difficult for people who often have to spend hours trying to remember events from their childhood. No significant differences were found between word recall, interview, focused and exhaustive recall. The amount of early childhood memories a person can recall depends on many factors, including the emotions associated with the event, their age at the time of the event being remembered and the age at the time they are asked to recall an early memory. Although people assume that not remembering a childhood memory means they have forgotten the event, there is a difference between availability and accessibility. Availability of a memory is the idea that a memory is intact and that it is stored in memory. Accessibility of a memory is determined by the moment in time when a person is trying to retrieve that memory. Therefore, cues may influence which memories are accessible at any given time, although there may be many memories available that are not accessible. Some other research suggests that people’s earliest memories go back to ages 3 or 4. Osher and Neisser reported that some events, such as the planned birth of a sibling in the hospital, are easily recalled if they occur at age 2. However, The bits and pieces of these memories obtained in their research may not be indicative of true episodic memory. An alternative hypothesis is that these apparent memories are the result of educated guesses, general knowledge of what should be, or external information acquired after the age of two. According to a study by West and Burr, their research suggests that earlier memories have less emotional content than later memories, and are less personally significant, unique, and emotional. Earlier memories do not appear to differ greatly in perspective. However, certain life events lead to more vivid and earlier memories. Adults find it easier to recall memories of personal, rather than general, events from early childhood. This means that a person will remember getting a dog, but not the appearance of Halley's Comet. Psychologists have debated the age of early adult memories. So far, estimates have ranged from 2 to 6–8 years of age. Some research shows that the catch-up for childhood amnesia is 2 years of age for the birth of a sibling and 3 years for the death or change of home. Thus, some memories are available from Early childhood than previous research has suggested. Some research suggests that until about age 4, children cannot form context-rich memories. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories from early childhood may be related to the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. It also suggests that adults can access fragmented memories from about age 3, while memories of events are typically recalled a little later. This is similar to research showing the difference between personal memories and well-known events. Well-known memories change to more personal memories at about age 4.7. Children can form memories at a younger age than adults can remember. While the efficiency of encoding and storage processes allows older children to remember more, young children also have a large memory capacity. Infants can remember sequences of actions, the objects used to produce them, and the order in which the actions unfold, suggesting that they possess the precursors to autobiographical memory. Children remember with 50% accuracy events that occurred before age 2, while adults remember almost nothing before that age. By age 2, children can retrieve memories several weeks later, suggesting That these memories can become relatively permanent could explain why some people have memories from this young age. Children also show an ability to remember events that happened before they had the vocabulary to describe them nonverbally, whereas adults do not. Such findings have prompted research into when and why people lose these previously accessible memories. Some suggest that as children get older, they lose the ability to recall memories that preceded verbalization. One explanation for this is that after language skills are developed, memories that were not verbally encoded are lost within the mind. This theory also explains why many individuals’ early memories are fragmented—the nonverbal components are lost. However, contrary findings suggest that primary-age children remember more precise details about events than they reported at a younger age and that children between the ages of 6 and 9 tend to have verbal memories from very early childhood. However, research on animal models seems to suggest that childhood amnesia is not due solely to the development of language or any other human faculty. This increased ability of children to remember their early years does not begin In fading until children reach double digits. By age 11, children show levels of childhood amnesia seen in young adults. These findings may suggest that there are some aspects of the adolescent brain, or neurobiological processes of adolescence, that trigger childhood amnesia. The phenomenon of childhood amnesia is not limited to humans. This was initially investigated in mouse models and found that younger mice forget a conditioned avoidance response to a shock-paired chamber more quickly than older mice. These findings have also been replicated in a number of different species with different learning paradigms. The importance of animal model research should not be underestimated because these studies have reported neurobiological findings about childhood amnesia and would be ethically impossible to conduct in humans. Because childhood amnesia has been observed in animals, its occurrence cannot be explained solely by human-specific cognition such as language or self-understanding. Of course, a major criticism of animal models is that development and cognition in animals and humans are quite different. Researchers have attempted to address this by creating timelines for animal development based on changes in learning and memory abilities, brain development, and hormones. Many factors influence memory in humans, including gender and culture. Differences in early memory between these groups can tell us about the possible causes and effects of childhood amnesia. Importantly, the individual differences described below tell us that parenting styles and an emphasis on cultural history when educating children may lead to recall of early childhood memories. This suggests that compensation for childhood amnesia can be modified by parenting and education styles, and is therefore not entirely predetermined or biological. In general, when a gender discrepancy in age at first memories is found, females have Earlier memories than males. Women’s earliest memories may be explained by the fact that mothers generally have a more detailed, evaluative, and emotionally reminiscent style with daughters than with sons, which has been shown to result in richer childhood memories. Women across cultures tend to have more information-dense memories than men, and women tend to refer to others more often in their earliest memories. Men, on the other hand, show a greater focus of early memory on their individual selves. Men have been found to be more likely than women to report negative memories. In contrast, studies have shown that girls are more likely to remember traumatic and transitional events, while boys often remember play events. Early memories have also been found to be more accurate in their reflections of male friendliness and female dominance. MacDonald et al. found that Chinese participants had earlier, later memories than New Zealand European or Maori participants. This effect was due to Chinese women, who had a mean age at first memory of 6.1 years. This suggests that Chinese women have later memories than Chinese men, which differs from the general finding that women report earlier first memories than men. It has been suggested that because sons are valued more highly than daughters in China, parents may have more detailed, evaluative, and emotionally reminiscent styles with boys than with girls. Among American subjects, black women have been found to have later memories than black males or white females. Black women also tend to report lower rates of personal experience, which is independently associated with older age at first memory. White fathers may be more likely to use elaborative reminiscence prompts than black fathers with their daughters in black American cultures. The finding that Korean individuals have significantly later first memories than American individuals was originally thought to be due to the collectivistic nature of Asian cultures. The lack of an age discrepancy between Chinese males and New Zealand European individuals casts doubt on this theory. In addition, studies of black American populations, which are considered a more collectivistic society, have not reported later first memories than non-collectivistic cultures. However, children from Western cultures have been shown to report more detailed and emotional accounts than children from Eastern cultures. Maori adults report earlier memories The traditional focus on the past in Māori culture may have led to an early understanding of the nature of time, and the recovery of past memories. Māori are also more likely than Pakeha or Chinese individuals to cite a family story as the source of their memory. Individuals' earliest memories reflect their personality traits to a large extent. People who reveal more detailed memories are more likely to be open in their daily lives and to reveal a range of personal information to others. The characteristics of early memories reflect male friendliness and female dominance. Even when childhood events are not remembered episodically, they can be remembered implicitly. Humans can be conditioned and trained implicitly early on before they can recall facts or autobiographical events. This is most important in terms of emotional trauma. Adults can generally recall events from the age of 3–4 years, and have primarily experiential memories beginning at around 4.7 years. However, some suggest that adults with a traumatic and abusive early childhood report a recovery from childhood amnesia around 5–7 years. It has been suggested that this is because stressful experiences can harm Memory centers and may make it more difficult to form memories. This, coupled with the fact that priming can occur at a younger age, may suggest that children in abusive situations have implicit memory associations that were formed in response to the abuse. Whether or not these “repressed” memories can affect individuals is a matter of much debate in psychology. Very few adults have memories prior to 2.5 years of age. Those who report memories prior to this age are usually unable to distinguish between personal memory of the event and simple knowledge of it, which may have come from other sources. Events that occurred after the age of 10 are relatively easy to remember correctly, while memories from the age of 2 are often confused with images and false memories. Memories from early childhood are susceptible to false suggestion, making them less reliable. These should be treated with caution, especially if they have serious consequences. Imagining the details of a false event can encourage the generation of false memories. Studies have shown that people who merely imagine an event in childhood are more likely to believe it happened to them than events they have not imagined. This term has been coined imagination inflation and suggests that merely imagining An event that can make it seem more plausible that it actually happened. Using the same model, people who are shown a fake image of themselves as a child in an event that never happened can create false memories of the event by imagining the event over time. Therefore, this suggests that it would be possible to create false memories. This concern has led the American Psychological Association to advise caution in accepting memories of physically and sexually abusive events before the age of two. However, they also recommend not dismissing these memories entirely, due to the heinous nature of the crimes. Sigmund Freud is famous for his theories of psychosexual development that suggest that people's personality traits stem from sexual desires that develop from early childhood experiences. Freud's trauma theory, originally called the "seduction theory," posits that childhood amnesia was the result of the mind's attempt to repress memories of traumatic events that occurred in each child's psychosexual development. This supposedly led to the repression of the majority of memories from the early years of life when children were supposedly obsessed with exploring their sexuality. It is worth noting that Freud himself abandoned this theory in the late 19th century. The theory was exposed Freud, including his explanation of childhood amnesia, has been criticized for his heavy use of anecdotal evidence rather than scientific research, and for his observations that allow for multiple interpretations. While Freud's psychosexual theory has been widely debunked, there are some ideas to be made about the effect of childhood emotional abuse on memory. Examination of the effects of emotional trauma and childhood amnesia shows that stressful experiences do in fact disrupt memory and can damage central parts of the memory system such as the hippocampus and amygdala. Adults who were abused or traumatized in childhood form their earliest memories about 2–3 years later than the general population. Additionally, they have shown significant problems storing and retrieving visual, pictorial, and facial memories compared to non-traumatized individuals. This suggests that trauma can disrupt the formation of early childhood memories, but it does not necessarily provide evidence for Freud's repression theory. The amygdala and hippocampus are generally independent, but emotions and the amygdala are known to play a role in memory encoding, which is typically associated with the hippocampus. Research has found that later childhood memories have suggestive content. More emotional than previous memories and are rated as more vivid and vivid. It has been suggested that differences in the emotions experienced by infants and adults may be a cause of childhood amnesia. Whether highly emotional events can stimulate and improve reliable recall is still a matter of much debate. Some studies have found that emotional experiences are associated with faster retrieval times, leading to the belief that emotional events have increased the accessibility of our memories. If an event is particularly surprising, it receives priority processing in the brain, likely for evolutionary reasons. Evolutionary psychology holds that if a past event is particularly frightening or upsetting, one is able to avoid a similar situation in the future, especially if it jeopardizes one’s well-being. Additionally, the more significant the event, the greater the impact it has and the more times it has been rehearsed. Various findings have shown that events such as hospitalization and the birth of a sibling are associated with early childhood amnesia, which may be because they were emotionally memorable. However, other apparently emotional memories such as the death of a family member or having to move do not affect displacement, perhaps because the events They were not meaningful to the child. Therefore, some memories from early childhood are more available than others, leading to the conclusion that highly emotional events can be encoded and retrieved earlier than non-emotional events. One possible explanation for childhood amnesia is the lack of neural development of the infant's brain, which prevents the formation of long-term or autobiographical memories. The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, two key structures in the neuroanatomy of memory, do not develop into mature structures until about age three or four. These structures are known to be involved in the formation of autobiographical memories. The physiological approach seems to support the findings of amnesia in relation to amnesiacs and others who have suffered damage to the hippocampus. They cannot efficiently store or recall memories of past events, but they still exhibit perceptual and cognitive skills and can still learn new information. The development of the medial temporal lobe, which contains the hippocampus, has been found to have a specific influence on the ability to encode and maintain memories from early childhood. While the neurological explanation explains the gaps in memories in very young children, it does not provide a complete explanation for childhood amnesia because it fails to account for the years after age four. It also fails to address the problem that children themselves do not develop childhood amnesia. Children as young as two and three have been found to remember things that happened when they were only one to two years old. This finding that three-year-olds can retrieve memories from earlier in their lives suggests that all the necessary neural structures are present. To remember episodic information in the short term, but it is clear that it will not persist in the long term into adulthood. The finding that all species experience profound forgetting of information formed during childhood suggests that anthropocentric explanations for childhood amnesia are inherently incomplete. A comprehensive understanding of childhood amnesia will require a neurobiological explanation of why children forget. However, there are reasons to believe that different interhemispheric connections have an impact on recall of events from very early in life. Mixed saccades and bilateral blinking eye movements have been associated with earlier displacement of childhood amnesia, leading to the conclusion that interactions between the hemispheres are associated with increased memory for events in early childhood. Research into the neural substrates of childhood amnesia using animal models has found that the major inhibitory neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid may be involved in regulating the retrieval of childhood memories in adults. GABA activity is known to be higher in early childhood development than in adulthood, not only in animals but also in humans. The researchers hypothesized that increased activity GABA in development has an impact on memory retrieval later in life. Previous studies have shown that GABA helps forget childhood fear memories and that it may be a general mechanism for regulating infant memory retrieval. This can also be seen in humans. Benzodiazepines are a class of psychoactive drugs that increase GABA expression and are known to cause anterograde amnesia, or the failure to encode memories after drug administration. People taking benzodiazepines have been found to perform worse on learning and memory tasks than naïve subjects. Previously, it was assumed that neurogenesis, or the ongoing production of neurons, was terminated after development. However, recent findings have shown that there are high levels of neurogenesis in the hippocampus in early childhood that gradually decline into adulthood, although neurogenesis continues slowly. Since the hippocampus is known to be vital for memory processes, there are clear implications for childhood amnesia. Animal research has shown that the age of high neurogenesis is during a period of development when stable memories are less likely to be formed. It has been suggested that neurogenesis in the hippocampus leads to the deterioration of existing memories. This may be due to increased Competition between new and existing neurons, followed by replacement of synapses in pre-existing memory circuits. This theory has been supported in mouse models where increased levels of neurogenesis also led to forgetting. In addition, decreased neurogenesis after a new memory was formed led to reduced forgetting. Are infants’ “lost” memories permanently erased or do they gradually become inaccessible over time? Consistent with a deficit in memory retrieval, optogenetic reactivation of neural populations that encoded memory drives memory recall in adulthood. In addition, memories are consolidated via transfer from the hippocampus to the cortex. This transfer occurs preferentially during periods of high excitability in the hippocampus, i.e., during spike oscillations. Spike oscillations represent increased communication between the hippocampus and the cortex. This increase in experience-related activity does not occur until a certain age, suggesting that this may be a mechanism for amnesia in children. Some also believe that the development of the cognitive self has a strong influence on the encoding and storage of early memories. As young children grow older, a developing sense of self begins to emerge as they become aware that they are a person with unique and specific characteristics and have thoughts and individual feelings separate from others. As they gain a sense of self, they can begin to organize autobiographical experiences and retain memories of past events. This is also known as the development of a theory of mind, which refers to the child’s acceptance that he or she has beliefs, knowledge, and ideas that no one else has access to. The developmental explanation asserts that young children have a good understanding of semantic information but lack the retrieval processes needed to link past and present episodic events to create a personal autobiography. Young children do not appear to have a continuous sense of self over time until they develop an awareness of themselves as an individual human being. Some research suggests that this awareness is thought to form around the age of 4 or 5, at which point children can understand that recent past events affect the present, whereas 3-year-olds are still unable to grasp this concept. This recognized connection of the past to the present and the concept of continuous time and thus the continuous self is also aided by memory talk with adults. By explaining and repeating the events they have experienced, adults help children encode memories as part of their personal past and they become essential to their being. The incomplete development of language in young children is thought to be a crucial cause Infancy amnesia is because infants do not yet have the language capacity to encode autobiographical memories. The usual timeline for language development seems to support this theory. There seems to be a direct relationship between language development in children and the early age at which we can obtain childhood memories. Performance on verbal and nonverbal memory tasks shows that children with more advanced language abilities can report more during a verbal interview and demonstrate superior nonverbal memory compared to children with less advanced language skills. If children lack language, they will not be able to describe memories from infancy because they do not have the words and knowledge to explain them. Adults and children can often recall memories from around three or four years of age during a period of rapid language development. Before language develops, children often retain verbal memories and may use symbols to represent them. Therefore, once language develops, one can effectively describe one’s memories in words. The context in which one encodes or retrieves memories is different for adults and infants because language is not present during infancy. Language allows children to organize their personal experiences of the past and present and to share these memories with others. Others. This exchange of dialogue makes children aware of their personal past and encourages them to think about their cognitive selves and how past activities have affected them in the present. Several studies have shown that simply discussing events with children, in general, can lead to easier memory retrieval. There has also been research indicating that the degree to which a child discusses events with adults shapes autobiographical memory. This has implications for gender and cultural differences. Autobiographical memory begins to emerge when parents engage in memory talk with their children and encourage them to think about why a particular event occurred. Memory talk allows children to develop memory systems for categorizing general versus unique events. The sociocultural developmental perspective states that language and culture play a role in the development of a child’s autobiographical memory. An important aspect of this theory is the difference between parents who discuss memories at length with their children in a detailed manner, and those who do not discuss memories. Children of parents who discuss memories with them in a detailed manner report a greater number of memories than children who do not discuss their memories. The memories are described in more detail. This has implications for cultural differences.