The topic of infantile amnesia, or often referred to as one’s earliest childhood memory, has been studied for more than 100 years. Recently, there have been increased efforts to examine cultural differences in earliest childhood memories. The present study recruited participants (N = 242) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MT), referred to as Turkers, who were either from an individualist (United States) or collectivist (India) culture, and compared their earliest recollections. Turkers from India reported earliest recollections that were from a later age, had more social themes, had more unpleasant memories, had more specific memories, and took longer to complete the task compared to Turkers from the United States. These findings suggest that unique cultural differences may be associated with early memories, which may reflect cultural differences in the development of one’s self-concept.

婴儿遗忘症（通常被称为儿童的最早记忆）已经研究了100多年。最近，人们加大了努力，以检验儿童早期记忆中的文化差异。本研究招募了参与者（N= 242）来自亚马逊的机械特克（MT），也就是特克（Turkers），他们来自个人主义（美国）文化或集体主义（印度）文化，并比较了他们最早的回忆。与来自美国的图尔克人相比，来自印度的图尔克人报告的最早回忆来自晚年，具有更多的社会主题，具有更令人不愉快的记忆，具有更多的特定记忆，并且花费了更长的时间来完成任务。这些发现表明，独特的文化差异可能与早期记忆有关，这可能反映出一个人自我概念发展中的文化差异。