What is your earliest memory? It depends.

What is your earliest memory? It depends. Carole Peterson. Memory, May 6 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2021.1918174

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article is a selective review of the literature on childhood amnesia, followed by new analyses of both published and unpublished data that has been collected in my laboratory over two decades.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.

KEYWORDS: Childhood amnesiainfantile amnesiaearly memoriesfirst memoriesautobiographical memory

Discussion

It is clear that very young children indeed form memories, and many of these can be verbally described (see Bauer et al., 2019, for an overview of types of relevant evidence). The question of “when do personal memories start” has been an often-asked question in the childhood amnesia literature, and answers to this question have influenced theory construction about early memory. However, recent research has shown that access to early memories is often shaped by a range of both cognitive and social factors that interact (see Wang & Gülgöz, 2019, for a number of articles that address this in a special issue on childhood memory, as well as the edited volume by Gülgöz & Sahin-Acar, 2020, on autobiographical memory development).

Theoretical implications

In the current article, I have reviewed relevant literature on childhood amnesia and then re-examined data collected from a range of research studies that has been conducted in my laboratory over a number of years as well as included new data that have not been previously published. These analyses have several theoretical implications.

First, an answer to the question of when one’s earliest memory occurs is a moving target rather than being a single static memory. 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. Table 1 demonstrates considerable movement in the identification of their earliest memory, even though the memory they had described in an earlier interview was not forgotten. Moreover, almost half the time they retrieved a new and yet-earlier “first” memory when interviewed 2 years later. Some prior reports have emphasised the important role of forgetting (Cleveland & Reese, 2008; Van Abbema & Bauer, 2005), but Table 1 suggests that although forgetting is occurring and cannot be theoretically “forgotten”, as Bauer (2015) reminds us, it is but a partial explanation for changes in what is identified as the “earliest memory”.

Secondly, what is provided as a so-called “earliest memory” is highly malleable. Prior research has shown that it can be experimentally manipulated (Kingo et al., 2013b; Peterson et al., 2009b; Wessel et al., 2019). However, as Table 2 shows, one does not need external prompts; simply recalling one memory seems to internally cue others from that early period of life, and many of these later-mentioned memories are chronologically much earlier, on average a full year and a half earlier in our data. This self-cueing is also demonstrated in Table 3 when one compares the date of individuals’ identified earliest memory and their chronologically earliest memory (i.e., comparing the top panel to the bottom panel). Thus, providing an early memory often results in self-cueing to additional and yet-earlier memories. This mechanism of self-cueing is likely also responsible for participants who had a prior Memory Fluency Task subsequently providing earlier memories in the Earliest Memory Task (compare the left and right panels in Table 3).

Thirdly, when recalling multiple memories from the same life period, people do not seem to situate them on a continuous timeline as the memories are recalled. Prior research has suggested that the memories themselves and dating of those memories are independent; Table 4 suggests that memory dates are also independent of each other. How else can one explain the phenomenon of people providing memories from specific dates and a few minutes later identifying different and later-dated memories as their very first one? A mental timeline of memories does not seem to be constructed during recollection.

Limitations

In all of the analyses presented above, participants were providing their own dating of their very early memories. Yet people are notoriously poor at memory dating, as a host of other research studies have shown. The telescoping errors described above are only one example of dating error, and few other studies focus on the accuracy of the dating for people’s very early memories. What is needed in childhood amnesia research are independently confirmed or documented external dates against which personally derived dates can be compared. These are not found in the research cited above on telescoping errors since parental dating was used there for comparison with child dates, and parents too are likely to make dating errors. Such research using verified dating is currently ongoing, both in my laboratory and elsewhere.

Secondly, there are statistical limitations to the analyses presented above. Most of the analyses are post-hoc rather than pre-planned, and as such, are tentative. They can be seen as patterns that require further targeted research, and suggest avenues for additional exploration.