The Origins of Our Memory
Memory is one of the cognitive functions underlying human development and learning processes. The ability to memorize people, objects, events, sounds, etc., is fundamental for effective functioning in the world. Without memory, developing language, relationships, or personal identity would be impossible.
Most people have no memories of what happened before the age of 3-4 due to infantile amnesia, a phenomenon responsible for the difficulty adults have accessing memories of experiences in the first 5 years of life (Hayne, 2004).
In reality, children have very powerful memory mechanisms that allow them to retain information and learn quickly from the environment around them. At birth, for example, they are able to recognize the sounds of the mother’s voice and the prosody of the native language (Mehler et al., 1978; Lee & Kisilevsky, 2014) and to remember, even if for short periods, faces (Bushnell, 2001) and sounds just heard (Benavides-Varela et al., 2011; 2012; 2017). These memory capacities allow them to organize information in a wholly implicit and automatic way, based on increasingly long-lasting memories and to start fundamental mechanisms of acquisition of the native language.
The child’s memories then gradually change regarding the “storage space” and the strategies used for information retrieval (Gathercole, 1998). Other cognitive and neural processes occur together with these changes. For example, significant development of the medial temporal lobe and language production facilitate the construction of declarative memories, that is, communicable memories of events or successes that can be consciously recalled (Nelson, 1995; Richmond & Nelson, 2007).
References:
- Benavides-Varela, S., Gómez, D. M., Macagno, F., Bion, R. A., Peretz, I., & Mehler, J. (2011). Memory in the neonate brain. PLoS One, 6(11), e27497.
- Benavides-Varela, S., Hochmann, J. R., Macagno, F., Nespor, M., & Mehler, J. (2012). Newborn’s brain activity signals the origin of word memories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(44), 17908-17913.
- Benavides-Varela, S., Siugzdaite, R., Gómez, D. M., Macagno, F., Cattarossi, L., & Mehler, J. (2017). Brain regions and functional interactions supporting early word recognition in the face of input variability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(29), 7588-7593.
- Bushnell, I. W. (2001). Mother’s face recognition in newborn infants: Learning and memory. Infant and Child Development: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 10(1‐2), 67-74.
- Gathercole, S. E. (1998). The development of memory. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 39(1), 3-27.
- Hayne, H. (2004). Infant memory development: Implications for childhood amnesia. Developmental Review, 24, 33–73.
- Lee, G. Y., & Kisilevsky, B. S. (2014). Fetuses respond to father’s voice but prefer mother’s voice after birth. Developmental psychobiology, 56(1), 1-11.
- Mehler, J., Bertoncini, J., Barriere, M., & Jassik-Gerschenfeld, D. (1978). Infant recognition of mother’s voice. Perception, 7(5), 491-497.