Our Earliest Memories Begin At Age Two-and-a-Half Study Says

Do you know how old you are in your earliest memory? A new study is strongly suggesting that you don’t.

The study says that on average the earliest memories that people can recall point back to when they were just two-and-a-half years old. The findings, published in peer-reviewed journal Memory, pushes back the previous conclusions of the average age of earliest memories by a whole year.

“When one’s earliest memory occurs, it is a moving target rather than being a single static memory,” explains childhood amnesia expert and lead author Dr. Carole Peterson, from Memorial University of Newfoundland. “Thus, what many people provide when asked for their earliest memory is not a boundary or watershed beginning, before which there are no memories. Rather, there seems to be a pool of potential memories from which both adults and children sample. And, we believe people remember a lot from age two that they don’t realize they do. That’s for two reasons. First, it’s very easy to get people to remember earlier memories simply by asking them what their earliest memory is, and then asking them for a few more. Then they start recalling even earlier memories – sometimes up to a full year earlier. It’s like priming a pump; once you get them started its self-prompting. Secondly, we’ve documented those early memories are systematically misdated. Over and over again we find people think they were older than they actually were in their early memories.”

The study is based on analyses of data from a range of published studies as well as inclusion of new unpublished data, gathered over two decades from 1999 to 2020.

For more than those 20 years Dr. Peterson has conducted studies on memory, with a particular focus on the ability of children and adults to recall their earliest years.

Overall, it shows that children’s earliest memories come before when they think it happened, as confirmed by their parents.

Source: https://bit.ly/35ljmrm