Sorry, I Forgot…

By Rachel Lismore-Burns A Canadian study has revealed that young children can remember very early childhood memories. Typically, a teenager will struggle to remember much before the age of 3-4 years and any memories recalled from before this age will be vague. However, a new study conducted by the Memorial University of Newfoundland has found that 4 year olds could recall memories from as young as 18 months with surprising accuracy. Parents of the 100 children who took part in the study could corroborate the majority of memories that were recalled. Two years later the children were followed-up and asked to recall their three earliest memories. These were not the same as those given before but were from a later period in the child’s life. Even with prompting, the children could not remember the memories that they had easily recalled 2 years previously. Dr Carole Peterson, lead researcher in the study said: "What surprised us is that we would give these really detailed cues to the children about memories they had told us about two years previously and they would say 'No, that never happened to me'." This study brings to light a new idea about childhood memories; that during childhood we use a different method to encode our memories, which explains why so many of us cannot recall anything from our early lives. The majority of research currently points towards a structure in the cortex known as the hippocampus as the base for memory. Memories are stored here in the short term until they are consolidated and then stored in the area of the cortex where the stimulus was initially experienced (so visual memories are stored in the visual cortex). Other research has found evidence of single cells representing each individual memory. Studies into this so called ‘Grandmother Cell Hypothesis’ have found that certain neurons activate only to a picture of your Grandmother or Jennifer Anniston or Brad Pitt and so on. With the publication of the Canadian study it seems that research into memory has a long way to go to discover what happens to the elusive childhood memories.