researchers have almost always taken participants’ identified age at the time of their first memory at face value. But these age estimates seem to be vulnerable to consistent errors.

As a consequence, the long-standing belief of when earliest memories begin may be wrong, and memories may be much earlier than prior research suggests. […]

Thus, if someone thinks that they remember an event that occurred when they were 3 or 4 years of age, they were probably much younger. In other words, many people can remember back to when they were 2 years of age or even younger, but do not realize it because of systematic errors in memory dating and because they only tried to recall a single memory.

{ Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition | Continue reading }

memory | December 4th, 2023