PSY 457LEC Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Childhood Amnesia, Autobiographical Memory, Environmental Noise
Document Summary
To start learning the structure & properties of the world, infants must ignore environmental noise, & stimuli from which they have nothing more to learn. Children"s attention spans, the length of time for which they can sustain focused attention, with age. By 11 mo, they seek out objects from which they can learn. Infantile amnesia: the tendency for adults to have few autobiographical memories from below the age of 3. 5-4. Hard to verify memories from childhood researchers focus on dateable, verifiable events, such as the birth of a sibling. Hard to know whether childhood memories are genuine recollections / are reconstructed from stories and photographs. To address infantile amnesia, ask children & college students specific questions about the birth of a sibling when they were 3-11 yrs old. If birth occurred after age 3, relatively little forgetting occurred (even if it was long ago) If birth occurred prior to age 3, not much was remembered.
