I've told people about this many times. And, people just can't or won't believe me. A history professor told me that this is impossible, because children can't remember anything before the age of 3. He was adamant about it, and completely dismissive of my claims. I think these kinds of pseudo-scientific research (you know, taking polls and applying statistics) should be taken with a grain of salt. One should NOT draw definitive conclusions from them.

It seems to me that not believing you is the right thing to do. Childhood amnesia is well-studied; false memories are equally well-studied and are easily formed; since the former is more probable than an exception to the latter, unless you have additional evidence (which you can't really produce), I have no reason to believe your claims.

It's more probable that you reconstructed those memories from stories told by other people, even if you forgot hearing those stories before remembering the event, than that you're an exception to a well-studied and widely documented event.

Cognitive psychology is hardly psuedo-science, and in this instance, there were no polls conducted. This was a longitudinal study that took considerable resources to conduct and involved a seemingly well-designed experimental test. The findings are entirely in line with what the rest of the data in the field suggests, so it shouldn't be controversial. There were no polls involved, either.

It's frustrating to believe something that contradicts most available evidence, and it must be even more frustrating to not have a way to demonstrate the truth of such a belief. You'll notice that even this article doesn't claim that all memory prior to age 7 is irretrievably erased, and it's fully possible you truly have the memories you have -- but it's nonetheless improbable, and it isn't wrong to disbelieve you.

I'm sorry, but you have your science backwards. You don't dismiss evidence because it doesn't fit your current hypothesis.

Most significantly though, you grossly misunderstand statistics/surveys if you think it's possible to extract definitive physiological truths out of a subjective "how do you feel about remembering X?" survey.

For what it's worth anecdotally, I also can access memories from when I was 3-4 years old, and I can easily prove they're not fabricated memories because the memories in particular were not retold, and in some cases took some effort to actually confirm when I was the only one remembering them (even parents forgot).

Usually the memories are misc. trivia -- e.g. the design of the wallpaper of a house I only lived in until I was 4, a certain set of kids' cups I only used until I was 6, etc. There is no way these are false memories, because nobody told such things to me. I also remember some of my thoughts as a very young child, which is interesting, because they're very different from adult thoughts (though obviously I can't really "confirm" this in the same way I can physical memories).

Anyone saying childhood amnesia occurs completely is completely misguided. Of course, I have "childhood amnesia" like everyone else in the sense that most of those memories I haven't accessed in a long time, and can't recall them instantly at will. But they're still there, and I can access them with meditation if I want.

It is you who are misunderstanding either science, or what Tedks is saying. Mililanis story is not evidence, it is an anecdote. Based on our understanding of the human mind, it is simply more likely that his/hers story is a false memory rather than a true memory from a young age. Obviously it could be a true memory, but it is unlikely.

On the topic of false memories: I actually have several memories from a young age that directly contradicts with each other. I remember longing for a specific Nintendo game. I also remember getting the game as a christmas gift, looking at the box thinking "this looks like crap, why did they buy this?".

I see no contradiction there.

I also might remember having laid in a children's push chair but I am not 100% sure about this memory.

In your case, having memories from 3-4 years is entirely possible. However, your own subjective experience isn't definitive proof either. How can you prove that "nobody told such things" to you?

So while 90% of people do not remember anything before 3 or so, there are those who can, and it seems its not that hard to find them.

It is wrong to disbelieve him without knowing the standard deviation of the results. 40% is an average! For all we know (I can't check, as I don't have access to the original paper), there could have been two kids who had 90% recall and eight kids who had less than 40% recall. Knowing the standard deviation (and the nature of the distribution of results, whether it's a bell curve or whatever), would allow us to determine the probability of somebody having 90% recall post-childhood amnesia. Even if that probability was only 1/100, considering more than 100 people frequent this site it's expected that a few of them would have said 90% recall.

After all, the primary form of evidence for any given memory is the verbal recounting of detailed information. Without language, there aren't many ways to externalize a memory. Whether one is describing the experience of a memory, or reciting a coached, scripted tale ...if all the facts are correct what hope is there of disproving a dyed-in-the-wool memory?

Case in point: The drunkest I ever got was during a drinking game in college. I was black-out drunk. My memories are truncated about halfway through act one, and the next thing I honestly remember is waking up to the stench of my own vomit covered bed in my dorm room, but such an adventure it was for my roommates, and such a bardic tale it was for them to recount, over and over again, ad nauseum, that now, I too, can recite the tale, moment by moment from when I blacked out until I woke up. But, to the outsider, my recall seems accurate, and is vigorously affirmed by my roommates, and based on my ability to tell the story, a listener has no honest means of determining whether I was too drunk to remember or not.

So, while I buy into the mechanisms for how OP's claims to memories could be false in that he is perhaps only remembering the plot of the story, and not the experience itself, I'm still open to believing OP's claim to certain vivid memories.

I don't think childhood amnesia is a bottomless black pit from which nothing ever returns. Very obviously, certain aspects of learning must survive, and I think the keystones of our emotional development are indelible. Early traumatic experiences stay with people for very long periods of time. Being bullied, humiliation, loss of a pet. Those are foundational learning experiences. The detail of the bulk of our day-to-day experiences may get lost, but set pieces, scenes that perfectly encapsulate a profound learning experience are different from the tangential recall of banal routine. I think animals are wired to retain certain types of experiences, even from very young ages.

The phenomenon of memory is not necessarily constrained by hard statistical numbers. At least that is my opinion.

I'd offer up similar evidence of my own experiences, although I'm sure they'd be readily dismissed as subjective and unsubstantiated.

Well, this is exactly my point -- that this happens regularly, and isn't even commented upon, in many posts on HN when the inner state is, to take an example, a woman discussing her feelings of exclusion or a racial/social minority discussion their feelings of oppression. They're regularly dismissed as being "too sensitive" or having "misinterpreted the situation". But in this post particularly, the vast majority of responses are people who are directly contradicting the (controlled experimental) evidence, and there's very little pushback from the community at large.

In a perfect world, I'd expect each and every person who responded in a noncritical way to this post to respond similarly to future posts (if they're still active on HN) in which they're not the discouraged party. But... I think we all know the odds of that happening.

I hadn't even noticed this irony! Thanks for pointing it out. It's pretty hilarious.

This isn't really how evaluating evidence works is it? Suppose I told you that I have a magic flying carpet but I am unable to let you see ever it. You have as much evidence that I am lying as that I am telling the truth. It is still very likely that I am lying, because of all the other data you have available on the plausibility of magic flying carpets.

Is this the right assumption about the meaning of "improbable" in the context of this data and category of studies? One way we could interpret improbable is the way David Hume does in the "Of miracles" chapter of his 1748 treatise: that is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely not the case. The other way would be that the parent post either himself, or the memory to which he is referring is simply an outlier -- that is, a lottery winner of people or memories simply not clustered around the mean of being lost to this amnesia phenomenon.

In the case of the former, I would totally agree with the conclusions of your comment and the professor cited in the parent. In the case of the latter I think it merely points out that we're applying the wrong kind of skepticism over these claims. Somebody always, eventually wins the lottery. I think this is a valid distinction that can be made, and if so, doesn't hold us to discounting anecdotes as summarily false.

People want to feel that they are special, together with the fact that the other people involved, the parents, have probably forgotten talking about it as well, since they forgot about the even happening.

It seems to my mind that your disbelief should be qualified with an understanding of how common the exceptions are. When you assume that everyone is the same, you are going to miss out on differences.

My earliest memory was, I think, from when I was 1. I think we were moving from California to Michigan and I remember looking out the window and seeing a bank of grass. However, I could be wrong. It could have been later.

What I can tell you though for certain is that I have precise, detailed memories of things from when I was 2 to 3 that are not details that people describe. I can tell you most of the details of the apartment we lived in there, including the flooring, how my mother cooked dinner, what she often cooked, and so forth (I don't know the name of what she cooked. All I know is it included both lamb and eggplant and was cooked on a hotplate).

I could probably draw for you the pattern on the linoleum in the bathroom.

What's really funny is that the level of detail I remember about the living spaces I lived after the age of about 4 drops off considerably. But then I won't claim to be normal in this regard. The next house we lived in, I remember mostly the yard. The house after that I hardly remember at all. The house after that we lived in for seven years, but I still remember the yard and to a less extent than the others.

Now I remember some things from those early years my parents don't, for example what motivated some of my temper tantrums at the age of about 2 (pinkeye medication meant I couldn't see the all-important train passing behind the house). And I couldn't tell you anything beyond probably what I could see from indoors. But I can describe in near perfect detail large parts of the apartment, and those details are not really ones people talk about, at least in my family.

Touching tale, here's where it gets interesting. I remember that, but later (over 30 years later) I discussed this with my parents. Turns out, I'd been left at a neighbor's house while my dad went to fetch her home. They got me afterward. I wasn't THERE to see her walk in.

I'm not trying to suggest that your memories are not real. But memory is a strange thing. They do not work like photographs or audio recordings; instead memories are laid down in nerve connections and are refreshed by running through them again. It's sort of like having VHS tapes that are brittle: you keep the data by copying them over and over again. Having a photograph to refer to helps to cement it; having a story that goes with it helps you to repeat and thus remember it, and this can happen regardless (as in my case) of whether there was an accurate original "memory".

So perhaps that is the source of your history professor's skepticism. Now, he is simply flat-out wrong to dismiss your claims out-of-hand. There is significant individual variation in early memories -- and there ARE some people who have memories from age 2 or 3. But the nature of memory itself is such that such having an early memory like that may not mean exactly what you think it means.

Not that I'm disagreeing with your main points -- memories are subject to a strange game of telephone over the years. My own early childhood memories (all of childhood, really, and much of post-childhood as well) are pretty limited; I was under general anesthesia more than most kids (more than 5 times; less than 50; I can't remember), which apparently messes with memory.

By contrast my wife has abundant and clear memories of much of her life, including early childhood; she's a writer. I'm sure her memories are reworked as much as anyone's, and inaccuracies are introduced; but the raw material is so obviously greater than what I have in my own head.

Related tangent: she wrote a piece about navigating the unreliability of memory a couple of years ago: http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2012/01/blue/

Absolutely. In fact, I find it extremely interesting, in a philosophical sense, the implication that perhaps nothing we remember can be considered reliable.

But in this case 3 years old is quite young for an early memory and it is clear from other evidence that I have particularly poor memory for events (late age for most childhood memories, poor memories of events and conversations even today). So the most likely explanation is that my own memory is fabricated. Interestingly, that doesn't change the fact that I can still remember it!

> my wife has abundant and clear memories of much of her life [...] she's a writer

It is certainly a thing which varies strongly in different people. I am reminded of an author (I think it was Beaverly Cleary) being interviewed and mentioning that she had strong memories of her early childhood -- and that this was the source of much of her excellent writing.

> she wrote a piece about navigating the unreliability of memory

I read it. Wow... she's a great writer! Please pass on that I said so. I thought the pacing of that piece and the way it draws the reader in at the beginning were really wonderful. It is so difficult to write about racial issues in a way that is open to and accessible to readers from all races, but this piece managed that.

My first memories date back to that time, when I was 18 months old.

One of the first things I told my parents was that I didn't need diapers anymore. It was on the back seat of their car, on the passenger side (I remember the place, my mother was actually changing me after a long trip).

It was on the road to holidays in Spain, and I have distinct memories of the topography of the apartment, the beach and the bay, and their relative positions. I also remember going out for a walk alone with my dad, between the white villas.

We moved when I was four, and I also have several memories of the old house, including the full topography including furniture, a dark blue beach balloon, a harmless fall from the top of the staircase with a spherical vacuum cleaner, unrolling the toilet paper from the first floor to the ground floor because there wasn't any TP below... having the red toy car I had received as a reward for stopping sucking my thumb confiscated for relapsing.

I also remember the feeling of my long wet hairs on my back when I was lying on the chest in the bathtub, with the head raised. I only had long hairs between 2 and 3.

I believe you. One of our friends has a kid who is, I think, really smart. He's only a toddler (2 y.o.), but he is really talkative and has a good vocabulary. He could start talking before 2. I wouldn't be surprised if he has some recall of his toddler years. I will have to keep abreast of this as time goes by.

That's funny. My eariest memories are of the topography of the apartment we were living at the time. I am not sure I could tell you what the parking lot looked like or how the apartments were around it, but I coudl tell you that we were on the second floor, that it had a brick facade, the sort of flooring used in every room, the color of the walls, and the all-important detail for a 2 year old: there was a TRAIN that ran by out back every day).

Fascinating

I don't remember California at all. I remember the Michigan cities all very distinctly. So I believe that research.

You need this: http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/

After all, Phineas Gage basically got a pole through the brain and he survived[1]. Doesn't mean everyone can do it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

Other than that, I've got nearly nothing. No solid memories that aren't possibly just reconstructions from photographs or stories until I was about 10 or 11.

Were you an introspective child? Because I used to run back over my memories as I grew up, thinking through them in chronological order, just to test how much I could remember. That is probably what let them sink in and last though to my older age.

I also find it interesting that I recall my memory being better. When I was around 12, I remember being able to recall most of my childhood, but now it is just significant or emotional moments.

I wonder if solitude and quiet play are conducive to preserving memories. My children have much more stimulating, entertained lives than I had -- I had no computer, very little TV until age 10 or so. They seem more mature than I was, socially and cosmopolitanly, but also less introspective and thoughtful.

i've met some people have earlier memories that that. any 'limit' to memories sounds like pure bullshit to me.

I was a pretty introspective kid. I thought about my past and tried to recall my childhood even at the young age of 5. So perhaps my earliest memories are really just memories of being 6 or 7 and thinking back to when I was 2. Second hand memories, so to speak.

That's how I figure it works in my head.

When I was 3 or 4 I broke my nose playing on a playground. I remember that well. And I remember things from kindergarten and a lot of things from grade one.

My earliest memory is a vague memory when I was in a crib. Based on certain specific details of that memory my parents place it to when I was around 2.

I remember vague details of the homes we lived in after I was 3 or 4, but not the first home we lived in at all.

Apparently I had a very bad fall at some point and put one of my new teeth through my lip and made a bloody mess everywhere. I have a scar there to this day, but don't remember the event in the least.

I remember my mother teaching me the alphabet with a foam alphabet mat [1] and how to tie my shoes when I was probably 3 or 4. I also remember the moment my mother taught me the difference between how to say "three" and "tree" and permanently corrected what would have been a difficult speech impediment.

I remember my Kindergarten teacher's name and my favorite toys from when I was 4 and 5.

But the number and quantity of my childhood memories explodes after I entered 1st grade at 6. I feel like I remember more about 1st and 2nd grade then I do about most of the rest of my elementary and middle school education combined. Some really detailed events even.

1 - http://www.lcevafoam.com/img/Product/FM-910.jpg

A large majority (including me) are completely blank about anything before age 6 or so.

I know tough that before age 25 all memories where real, but now getting older the memories are becoming memories of memories, and it saddens me a lot.

I moved when I was 7, and it's a very distinct transition in the quality of my memories. I have tons of pre-move memories, including one confirmed by my parents as my 2nd birthday party, but they're primitive. No sense of time, just a jumble of memories that I can't place chronologically, and most are very brief moments. However, I remember the move and everything after it vividly and in chronological order.

I would suppose that the move made me reminisce about my old home during the period when my childhood memories were fading, and saved many of them from being lost.

Maybe more interesting is that I can't remember a single seizure my brother who had epilepsy had, although I can remember before and after moments (ages 3 and 4).

I remember the first year or two of school so that would be around age six. I remember suddenly realizing how to tell time, hands not digital, then looking up and the class was empty I was concentrating so hard I didn't realize everyone left.

My next oldest and clearest memories are when we went on a trip to the US and Ontario when I was seven. I remember that year because it's when Elvis died and we got lost in Niagara Falls, NY in a rundown neighbourhood seeing a man in curlers and a kid hiding in a garbage can.

My wife only moved when she was older than that, and she has a lot more very early memories, so I'm not sure it is actually linked with moving.

How old were you when you acquired language (the ability to compose complete sentences)?

But the flood of real memories doesn't start until nursery school, which was right around 3-4.

On a related note, there's a different type of memory that started to form later and that I can pinpoint to a VERY specific age...I refer to it as "cultural awareness/memory". I.e. movies, songs on the radio, etc. I was born in '78 and my earliest memories of that sort of stuff is all '85 (i.e. 7 years old). And what a year! Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, "We Built This City", "Born in the USA", etc.

I can barely remember any movies/songs from before then...maybe some in 84, but 83 is a basically non-existent to me. So maybe this is the sort of thing they mean when they're referring to "adult memories" ?

Aaaaand now I feel old.

It's theorized that the amygdala has a "gating" function for memory - we tend to recall memories more easily when they're highly emotional (especially anxiety, fear, trauma). I had a cognitive science professor who brought this up and asked people in the class what their earliest memories were - many of them were scary/anxious events (mine was moving out of an apartment and into a house).

I have many very vivid memories from under the age of 5; playing hide and seek, playing with lego, playing outside and being around family members on our family farm, I even remember big family meals from when I was around 4.

I honestly thought this was normal until about 10 minutes ago.

I have some "memories" that have definitely been created by looking at pictures later. I actually remember one particular case where it was a photo of me as an infant in my mother's arms and I told my siblings that I remembered that and that I was sucking on a biscuit (which you couldn't see on that photo). It turned out that there was another photo of the same time where you could see that I was indeed sucking on a biscuit. That "memory" had been created.

However I do have plenty of memories from childhood that were not created later by other means. The earliest being for sure around age 3, when I had eye surgery. I remember a few things very clearly of that period. (because it was different and somewhat traumatic for a 3yo) For the most part these were not reactivated later by pictures or recounted as stories. (because people around probably didn't even remember them themselves for being insignificant to them)

E.g. I remember being pushed by a girl behind me in line in kindergarten, my glasses fell on the ground and one lens popped out and I blamed her for it. I was likely around 4 or 5.

I have recently started therapy and we're doing what's called "lifespan integration" (http://www.lifespanintegration.com/) where we go through life events year after a year and where I try to picture each particular moment to feel like I'm there. One interesting effect is that more memories besides the initial ones written down have come back over time or some come back with more details. I would think that or other techniques (e.g. hypnosis) could help you remember more things.

It probably helps that a lot of these older memories are associated (in my mind) with the previous house, so when I remember a couple of memories from that house, it causes me to start thinking about other memories associated with that house. Just accessing these memories makes them more likely to stick around (but also increases the chance of distortion, as we rewrite the memories that we access).

> You could travel the world with an infant aged under 3 and it's almost guaranteed that when they get older they won't remember a single boat trip, plane ride or sunset. This is thanks to a phenomenon, known as childhood or infantile amnesia, that means most of us lose all our earliest autobiographical memories. It's a psychological conundrum because when they are 3 or younger, kids are able to discuss autobiographical events from their past. So it's not that memories from before age 3 never existed, it's that they are subsequently forgotten.

This is obviously tremendously overblown. I could just as easily point out that people who are over 60 frequently have no memory of things (even significant things) that happened in their 20s. It's a "psychological conundrum" because people in their 20s are able to discuss current events!

Memories, no matter when they originate from, fade with disuse. We have plenty of people, here and outside, who can attest to preserving early memories. Attacking them on the grounds that those memories could be reconstructions instead of strengthened "true" memories doesn't make any sense -- all memories are reconstructions; there is no possible way to distinguish between a "true memory" and a "reconstructed memory" at any age.

All that said, the coolest experiment I know of in this area concerned visiting children still in the process of language acquisition with a "marvelous machine" designed to be highly entertaining and memorable. The experiment showed that though the children remembered the machine a (couple?) years later, when asked about their memories of it, they would describe it using only words they knew at the time of the visit.

It suggests that childhood amnesia could be a result of us learning a new way of thinking when we grow up.

In other words, that whole anecdotes not necessarily being data thing. This study seems to show by and large there is something significant around the 7 year mark. Are there similar studies on other years?

I don't understand the relevance of this. There is no conflict between remembering swathes of your college and high school years, and forgetting other swathes. It covers a lot of time (and your 20s cover even more than that); there's plenty of room to forget large parts of it while remembering others.

Now, you seem to be saying it is simply a matter of the age of the memory. But you are completely disregarding the study, which shows that children around the age of 8 have a massive dropoff in what they can remember from a scant 2 years ago. This isn't a case of 2 years being a significant time. Indeed, they went out of their way to show that at age 6 they had a high recollection of things 2 years prior.

If there are studies on this at other ages, I'm interested. But the dismissive "older memories of course are lost" seems somewhat rude. Do you have specific questions with their techniques on how they established 7 as a significant age? Do you just think there would be other significant ages, as well?

> Indeed, they went out of their way to show that at age 6 they had a high recollection of things 2 years prior.

You have misread something. The study does not make reference to any 6-year-olds, or 8-year-olds, being tested for recall of events 2 years prior. The events tested always occurred at age three; they are comparing 5-year-olds' recall of events two years prior to 6-year-olds' recall of events three years prior to 7-year-olds' recall of events four years prior to 8-year-olds' recall of events five years prior to 9-year-olds' recall of events six years prior.

Furthermore, I specifically didn't say it's a matter of the age of the memory. If I had meant that, I would have said something like "memories fade with time". What I did say was "memories fade with disuse". If you exercise a memory (whether a true one or a false one), it will become stronger. If you don't, you will lose it.

Back to the specifics of this article. This study was more about whether conversational differences in discussing memories related to their retention. It appears they have some evidence that this could be the case. And note, they specifically looked at how it was discussed. All memories were discussed.

My mom took me to her friend's shop, they had 2 daughters and a chihuahua. One of the daughters (~5 years old) picked up the chihuahua and held it in front of my stroller, within reach. She urged me to pet it, and when I did, the dog bit the first joint of my left ring finger off. I remember that part, I remember crying, but I don't remember having it sewn back on.

To this day, I'm irrationally horrified of tiny dogs (I like big ones as long as they don't bark and show teeth).

Sidenote: Whoever sewed it back on didn't do a very good job; you can see it's slightly slanted and a bit rotated too. =( I'm thankful for getting it back though.

While in therapy in my twenties, at some point, I spontaneously remembered my own birth. In my teens, I knew a woman who claimed to remember her own birth. I think she was born outside and there was snow on the ground, so perhaps the shock of it made an impression?

My oldest son is able to access his early childhood memories. He is a visual and kinesthetic thinker and had trouble learning to talk. It took practice for him to be able to access them reliably and it involved him essentially translating them into English for the first time. I accidentally tripped across the fact that he had memories from infancy, which is a longish story that I don't have time to type out.

Short version: I think there is still lots to be learned about how early memories are formed, accessed, etc.

35+ years on I can still vividly remember the mascot, which bank it was, etc.

It saddens me that my earliest memory is of a form of advertising.

Anyway when I was a teenager we drove by the building we used to stop at and I told my dad about these early memories. It turns out that my mother had been seeing a therapist in that building on campus and once a week we would drive by to do a pickup and drop off. He was so shocked because they never discussed the matter with anyone, so he figured it was a real memory.

According to my dad I was six months old.

It's pretty vivid actually, and not only do I remember the "scene" but also how I felt and what I thought.

I have a few others like that, but this is the most ancient.

And what is the recall on 'pure' emotional memories?(Where the memory is primarily about the emotion, not what was occuring at the time).

This would be incredibly useful in counseling psychology (and possibly neuropsych), where emotional based memories can get corrupted or ingrained into a person's overall personality. (Think of getting burned by a stove becoming anything from a subconscious jerk away from a stove to full phobias).

But I can't stop wondering - do I really remember them, or do I only remember remembering them?

I mean, is it a "direct" memory? Or is it an act of recollecting a previous recollection of it?

Like, I remembered what I did at 4 when I was 6, fine. And then, if I happened to remember it still when I was 8, I actually remembered how I recalled the event being 6.

This is (I believe) how distortions gradually crawl in. And I believe it persists in adult life as well; every refreshing of a memory is actually rewriting it, thus damaging it in a way

The earliest I can remember is probably riding my first bicycle at around age 7-8, and everything after that is a flurry of memories that I have no idea where they came from. Little bits of conversations or of rooms that used to be in the house before they were knocked down and rebuilt, etc.

If the memories recalled were more adult like at a later age that suggests children recalled things at a later age that they didn't (couldn't?) recall at an earlier age.

This seems to me the most important insight in the article in respect of recall, that one would need greater understanding in order to recall details that one couldn't recall earlier. But mostly that recall is not [completely] limited by cognition.

I'm guessing that the results didn't really show that though ...

These sorts of articles just make me want to do research to rigorously address the obvious questions that don't appear to be addressed.

Since it's too late for you to promote your own memories, you could look for avenues to recall more of the ones you probably have hidden somewhere.

"Specifically, mothers who used more "deflections", such as "Tell me more" and "What happened?" tended to have children who subsequently recalled more details of their earlier memories."

>Another important finding was that the style mothers used when chatting with their 3-year-olds was associated with the level of remembering by those children later on. Specifically, mothers who used more "deflections", such as "Tell me more" and "What happened?" tended to have children who subsequently recalled more details of their earlier memories. //

It only mentions mothers. Suggesting either fathers were scientifically accounted for - the only way would appear to be by using subjects without contact with their father [or similar figure]. Or, that children chatting with fathers doesn't elicit the same response in recall and this was measured as insignificant and hence discounted.

The assumption that [all] children only chat over memories with mothers would be a rather massive flaw in a scientific analysis. [Yes there are of course other influences, primarily siblings I imagine, that are also unaccounted for].

Even if we assume that father's are absent during the events that are later recalled then interactions with father's could be more important. In that assumed environment mothers [or other carers] being present don't have to have details recalled to them; but I'm heading off-piste there.

The specification of it being "mothers" not "parents" or "primary care-givers" - assuming scientific rigour - must be important.

A quick search [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%28Bauer+PJ[Author]...] against Bauer PJ shows 10 papers on childhood memory which in abstract appear to all refer solely to maternal influence; though without reading the papers (I don't have access) or discussing them with the authors one can't really draw further conclusions. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=%28Bauer+PJ[Author]... returns no results.

[Interesting, this relates http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/fivush/lab/FivushL...]

I am disinclined to assume such scientific rigor as the explanation for that wording. I am much more inclined to assume unquestioned bias on the part of the people who wrote and administered the study. We have peer reviewed journals et al to help account for the fact that humans are pretty darn bad about being human, no matter their job title. But, ultimately, it is essentially impossible to weed out bias entirely.

I hope you are right and I am not but I see no reason at this time to think so.

They did, but why?

In order to isolate the mothers influence and make the study capable of providing scientific results one would need to rule out the major external factors - the primary one in my view is paternal interactions.

If they chose only mothers to assess - and the presence of only mothers in the other studies suggests they did - then this seems notable. Why? Did they already have a result showing paternal interactions had no effect? Are they trying to demonstrate a theory in which only maternal interactions are valid for stimulating recall? Or what? Just seems like a big old hole that would warrant a mention somewhere in such an article.

It was upon meeting a distant relative that made a dish the first time I met them and then again when I met them in my mid-twenties.

The second I smelled the smell of the dish I remembered an incident that I alone witnessed -- getting jalapeño oil in my eye when I was sneaking some of the dish.

Interesting memories are: the day I saw light shine on dust particles, watching my sister miss her first bus, and eating lint off the floor.

I've met people who, if the subject of very early memories came up in conversation, thought it was completely normal as they have similar ones. I've talked to other people, though, who insist that I can't possibly be telling the truth, perhaps because they can't even imagine remembering anything that far back.

I have the tendency to run the same kind of "history" in my dreams (obviously, awake!) before sleep then continue it later. I remember that I was playing a kind of war history or something (I forgot), and for the life of me, I can't do it like before. Now I only get stuck, and things are not fluid.

Exist some info about this? When is not possible anymore to have (on command) the same vivid dream bending as a child?

I'm fairly sure those aren't constructed memories, not sure why some specific memories have stuck with me compared to others from such an early age (they were nothing particular, really, no special events). The human brain is such a fascinating thing.

After that, all dark until age 2 with a lot - a lot - of kindergarden memories and so on till yesterday.

Always thought it was the norm.

I thought it was remarkable, since I can't recall any of my own memories from younger than 10 years old.

Any memories from highschool and such I know for a fact are second hand so I suspect maybe some people don't realise this - I'm more willing to believe in how easily we make false memories. I remember things as told to me by others even if they told me about it long ago. Riddle me that. I don't have amnesia, learning difficulties etc. Maybe I should keep a diary but it's a bit late for that.