Childhood Amnesia

Childhood Amnesia refers to our inability to recall events from the first 3 years of our lives. This is an interesting phenomenon because a lot of changes occur during that period, but we can only recall very few of those events. Psychologists have explored different factors that may explain childhood amnesia. Among them are:

• An immature hippocampus. Hippocampus is a part of the brain responsible for consolidating memories of life events. It fully develops in humans at ages 1 to 2. Thus, we may not have the biological capacity to store memories for events at those ages.
• An immature linguistic ability. We use language to organize and store information to memory. Because linguistic ability develops at age 3, we may not have the capacity to encode and store information pertaining to events that occurred during the first 3 years of our lives.