The Psychology Behind Infantile Amnesia

Childhood amnesia, also referred to as infantile amnesia, is one of the instances when adults cannot remember and revive their young childhood memories, generally at the age of three or four years old. Most people have no memory of life’s earliest episodes. Adults typically report their earliest memory around age 3–4, and recall from ages 0–2 is virtually nil (Wikipedia, n.d.; Scientific American, n.d.).

This is not because we lacked experiences back then, infants learn and recognise faces or routines, but because those experiences leave no lasting autobiographical trace. “We remember almost nothing from birth through early childhood,” Yale neuroscientist Nick Turk-Browne observes (Yale News, 2021). Why does our brain “blank out” its beginnings? Over a century of theory and experiment has wrestled with this puzzle, from Freud’s controversial ideas to cutting-edge neurobiology.

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Freud’s Repression Theory: A Ghost in the Nursery?

The whole concept of infantile amnesia has to be credited to Sigmund Freud, who in 1905 was inclined to the idea that childhood memories are suppressed as far as they are unpleasant (usually sexual). Freud believed that things that happen in the early years of life are repressed in the unconscious so as not to burden us with stressful memories. He even noted that his adult patients typically couldn’t recall events before age 6–8.

However, modern psychologists find no evidence for this repression theory. Today, Freud’s idea is treated mostly as a historical curiosity: no experiments show early memories vanish for repressive reasons (Wikipedia, n.d.). Indeed, childhood amnesia occurs even for ordinary, non-traumatic events. We know much more today about how memory works, and it turns out multiple factors, cognitive, linguistic, and neural, help explain why our babyhood remains a blank.

Read More: Freud’s theory of the Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious

Sense of Self and Memory: Finding “Me” in the Mirror

One influential idea is that autobiographical memory depends on a developing sense of self. Young toddlers don’t yet have a mature “I” that can anchor life events as their experiences. A child must grasp the idea “I exist in time” to encode personal memories. Psychologists call this the cognitive self-theory.

As toddlers grow (roughly 2–4 years old), they begin to recognise themselves as individuals with unique thoughts and feelings. Once a child has this emergent self-concept, often tested by the mirror-rouge “red nose” test around 18–24 months, they can start organising events into a personal timeline. In effect, younger children have semantic knowledge (facts about the world) but limited autobiographical linking of events. The brain structures that tie together the details of “what happened” and “who I was then” (like prefrontal cortex circuits) also mature slowly. Research suggests children don’t form a continuous self until about age 4–5, which corresponds with when stable memories begin to appear (Wikipedia, n.d.).

Because of this, the absence of a well-defined self can make early memories impoverished. In conversational studies, parents help children rehearse events (“Remember when you met Grandpa?”), And this scaffolding literally builds their sense of a personal past. Without that narrative scaffold, toddler memories may be too “lean or poorly organised” to retrieve much later. In short, before children can label themselves as agents with history, our brain doesn’t effectively file away those earliest experiences in a durable, autobiographical way (Psychology Today, n.d.).

Read More: Understanding Short-Term and Long-Term Memory: How We Retain What Matters

Words for Memory: The Language Hypothesis

Another related theory is that language development unlocks memory. Before children acquire the vocabulary to describe events, they struggle to encode them as stories. Without words, much of an infant’s experience is sensorimotor and nonverbal. When language suddenly blossoms around ages 2–3, children gain tools to narrate and thus solidify memories. Indeed, studies find a striking correlation between early language skills and age of first memory: children with more advanced verbal abilities tend to recall earlier events than those with delayed speech.

Language serves as the scaffolding for context. Once children can say things like “last summer” or “when I fell,” they can link events to a timeline. Before this, memories may exist in a raw form but are difficult to fetch. For example, very young children can nonverbally recognise places or objects from infancy when tested a day later, yet adults can rarely evoke any memory from before age 2.

One explanation is that after learning words, the mind essentially “rewrites” or replaces those nonverbal memories in a verbal narrative. Fragmented imagery or feelings from infancy (for example, “image” of a nursery lamp) lack the structure to be reported once they’re not actively rehearsed. This theory nicely accounts for why our earliest recollections often feel like isolated snapshots: the context and “story” around them were lost when language took over (Wikipedia, n.d.).

Read More: Are Multilingual Brains More Emotionally Intelligent? Cross-Cultural Language and Emotional Processing

What Research Shows: Experiments on Early Recall

Researchers have tested childhood amnesia with careful experiments. One common method is to ask adults or older kids to recall their first memories. Across studies, the average earliest memory falls around ages 3–4, with very few before age 2. For example, Bauer and Larkina (2013) found that both children and adults, when prompted with cue words, typically cite first memories from about three years old. Reminiscence-bump research also shows a “retrieval curve” of autobiographical memory rising from age 5 onward and peaking in young adulthood (the famous bump from ~15–25) (Wikipedia, n.d.).

Yet infants can remember things in the moment. Classic work by Carolyn Rovee-Collier showed that even 2-month-old babies learn tasks (like kicking to move a mobile) and remember them for days or weeks if prompted (Scientific American, n.d.). Even the youngest toddlers at the age of 2 can achieve this by remembering certain incidents (a birthday party, a trip) when reminded of it a few moments after they takes place. It is then that we understand the learning and the memory systems are on; and the question arises, what is the fate of those memories after that is.

There are studies that inform us that early memories are fading away. According to Uher and Neisser (1993), children who were provided with unforgettable events (such as watching a comet or visiting the hospital) were able to recall some of them even as adults. Those memories appear to be dubious.

Misdating is one of them: Cornell researchers Wang & Peterson revealed that after the years, children interviewed again still think their memory took place when they were older than they reported during the initial interview (Cornell Chronicle, 2011). As an example, a kid who at one time believed a memory occurred when they was 3 might subsequently declare that it occurred when he was 4. It is this telescoping effect that implies that our memory timeline marches forward as time goes by.

Notably, numerous experiments have shown that infants do not wipe memories; rather, they cannot be erased. One study showed that at 3 years old, children could remember an episode of play, recorded when they were 1 1/2, which their parents could confirm, but by age 10, the memory was gone unless specifically aroused. Likewise, infantile amnesia has been found to consist mostly of retrieval failure, judging by animal research evidence.

To use an example, an infant rat learns something and forgets it within a day, and when given a slight reminder of the cue (a light signal), it immediately remembers the lesson, just like aged rats. Human toddlers act in an identical manner: a cue or scenario (such as an acquainted nurse on the off possibility of a previous trip to the hospital) can revive a bygone memory. It suggests that the memory was encoded, though it was locked.

Read More: Reminiscence Therapy in Practice: Theory, Techniques, and Evolving Innovations

The Developing Brain: Anatomy of Forgetting

At the neural level, infantile amnesia closely parallels brain development. The hippocampus, essential for forming episodic memories, is notably immature in infants (Wikipedia, n.d.)(Yale News, 2021). Newborns have a rapidly growing hippocampus: its volume roughly doubles in the first two years (Yale News, 2021). Key subregions (the dentate gyrus and CA fields) continue developing well into childhood. Until these circuits mature, the infant brain does not yet have the wiring to stabilise memories across time.

This lack of maturity of the cortex is among the reasons the memories of babies are very short. The hippocampus-to-cortex connection system cannot be well developed, and therefore, early memories cannot be encoded to be stored as long-term memories. An imaging study conducted at Yale also established the hippocampal activity when babies just three months old were put to learn something, but Turk-Browne informs us that their brains are not integrated to remember every experience individually about a particular time and location, which is the hallmark of episodic memory.

Upon the occurrence of detecting any pattern in the world (e.g., language sounds) that does not necessitate the existence of a specific record of episodes, infants will discover that they are using the hippocampus. At the time when the circuits in the hippocampus reach maturity (usually at 4 to 5 years old), we acquire the skill of retaining and recalling more biographical experiences.

Another neurobiological factor is hippocampal neurogenesis (birth of new neurons). Rodents and primates have very high rates of neuron growth in the hippocampus during infancy, which then decline into adulthood. Josselyn and Frankland (2012) proposed that this may actively disrupt existing memories: every time new neurons integrate, they can overwrite or weaken old circuits. Indeed, mouse experiments show that boosting neurogenesis (through exercise) makes animals forget recent memories faster, while suppressing it preserves memories longer. This “neurogenic hypothesis” suggests infant brains are biologically primed to forget old experiences as a trade-off for developmental plasticity.

A major missing puzzle in this picture was introduced by Josselyn and Frankland (2012): during infancy, the hippocampus is experiencing intense neurogenesis or the growth of new neurons. This can overwrite or may interfere with the existing memory circuits and, hence, may not have stable memory. Since neurogenesis naturally decreases as people grow old, the brain gains the ability to conserve memory.

Read More: The Multilingual Brain: How Indian Children Juggle Multiple Languages and Scripts 

Conclusion

To conclude, infantile amnesia probably has numerous origins. It is not the presence of a villain but the interplay of an immature mind, lack of speech, and development of identity that causes the early memories to be dissolved. As children develop, every new power, speech, then self-reflection, and hippocampal circuitry, re-wires the storage of past experiences in retrograde fashion.

Memories of everyday family life at the age of 1 or 2 may not have formed with enough context or emotional depth to be retained over time.. The dramatic theory of repression put forward by Freud replaced these more down-to-earth but falsifiable concepts of cognitive and neural development. According to the current consensus, we leave behind our baby memories as latent traces, and as our brain develops and our narration abilities grow, we retain only the few memories we are capable of narrating. The years when people cannot remember are, therefore, not a mystery but a peek into the development of the memory itself.

Infantile amnesia serves as a reminder to us that remembering is an active construction: that we reconstruct our past with our brain, mind as it is now, and not in babyhood. And even though we will never remember that third birthday party, science certainly tells us that even infancy has played the silent role of making us into the individuals that we are, depositing the lessons and patterns even after the episodes fade out of view.