ABSTRACT

This article is a selective review of the literature on childhood amnesia, followed by new analyses of both published and unpublished data that has been collected in my laboratory over two decades. Analyses point to the fluidity of people’s earliest memories; furthermore, methodological variation leads to individuals recalling memories from substantially earlier in their lives. How early one’s “earliest” memory is depends on whether you have multiple interviews, how many early memories were requested within an interview, the type of interview, participation in prior tasks, etc. As well, people often provide chronologically earlier memories within the same interview in which they later identify a chronologically older memory as their “earliest”. There may also be systematic mis-dating to older ages of very early memories. Overall, people may have a lot more memories from their preschool years than is widely believed, and be able to recall events from earlier in their lives than has been historically documented.

摘要

本文是对儿童健忘症文献的选择性回顾，随后对我实验室 20 多年来收集的已发表和未发表数据进行了新的分析。分析指出人们最早的记忆是流动的；此外，方法上的差异导致个人回忆起他们生命中更早的记忆。一个人的“最早”记忆有多早取决于你是否接受过多次采访、一次采访中要求了多少早期记忆、采访类型、参与先前任务等。此外，人们通常会在同一个采访中提供按时间顺序排列的早期记忆。在采访中，他们后来将按时间顺序排列的更旧的记忆确定为他们的“最早”记忆。很早的记忆也可能存在系统性的错误约会。总体，