This is the age when your children's first memories are formed - Walla! health

2021-06-30T05:29:51.426Z

A new study has found that our earliest memories are formed a whole year earlier than previously thought. At what age do children begin to document and preserve memories? Details in the article >>

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This is the age when your children's first memories are formed

A new study has found that our earliest memories are formed a whole year earlier than previously thought.

At what age do children begin to document and preserve memories?

The details and explanations in the article

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To the full article

The memories are not static, they are more like a moving target.

Old photos (Photo: ShutterStock)

"When someone's earliest memory is created it is more like a moving target than a static memory. Accordingly, the answers people provide to the question, 'What is your earliest memory?' It is not a domain memory with a beginning and an end, but more like a pool of possible memories from which they sample something, "wrote Dr. Carol Peterson, the lead researcher and expert on amnesia (forgetfulness disease) in children.

On the other hand, Peterson also said that she And her colleagues believe that people remember from the age of two much longer than they know.They also suggested a possible explanation for the lack of full awareness of these early memories: "First, it is relatively simple to make people remember early memories. Enough to ask them 'what is your earliest memory?' Then ask them to remember a few more ... it makes them remember things even earlier - sometimes these are things that happened even a year earlier (from the memory they started from). It's like running a pump,After a few clicks, she starts pumping herself. "

The second reason is that memories are often incorrectly dated in our brain in a systematic way.

This happens because people tend to attribute to themselves in memory an older age than the age they really were.

In our early memories we tend to attribute to ourselves an older age.

Toddler walking (Photo: ShutterStock)

The telescope effect

In the current study, the researchers examined the memories of 687 participants who took part in the experiment since 1999, and they described a process they call the 'telescope effect'.

The effect makes people think that something happened a short time ago, and it causes people to err in the correct position of an event in their memory on the timeline.

In other words this effect makes you think your memories are fresher than they really are.

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"The farther the memory, the more the telescopic effect will make you think it happened later. It turns out that many people 'promote' their earliest memories in a year or so, to the age of three and a half. However, we found that when a child or adult remembers events after age 4, It happens less, "Peterson said.

After examining further studies alongside her research findings and telescope effect theory, Dr. Peterson concluded that humans have the ability to access memories from an earlier age than researchers have hitherto thought.