The amazing durability of infant memory: Three-year-olds show recognition of a person they met once at age one

The fate of our earliest memories is something of an enigma. As adults, most of us are unable to recall memories from before we were age three or four. And yet, as toddlers we are perfectly capable of storing and recalling memories from before that age. To solve this mystery, we need to understand more about how infant memory works. Now a clever study has provided a test of just how durable infant memories can be. Osman Kingo and his colleagues in Denmark have demonstrated that three-year-olds display recognition of a person they met just once when they were aged one.To maximise the chance of uncovering long-term memory through infancy and into early childhood, the researchers devised a scenario involving many many prompts - what they described as "massive cueing". Kingo and his team first renewed contact with parents and their children who'd taken part in an earlier study when the children were age one. That earlier research involved the infant children interacting with one of two researchers for 45 minutes - either a Scandinavian-Caucasian man or a Scandinavian-African man.Now two years on, 50 of these parents and children - the latter now aged three - were invited back to the exact same lab (hopefully cueing their earlier memories). Here the children were shown two simultaneous 45-second videos side by side. One video was a recording of the researcher - either the Scandinavian-Caucasian or Scandinavian-African man - interacting with them two years earlier; the other video ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs