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Memory
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Childhood amnesia: Empirical evidence for a twostage phenomenon

Fiona Jack & Harlene Hayne
a a a

University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Available online: 04 Oct 2010

To cite this article: Fiona Jack & Harlene Hayne (2010): Childhood amnesia: Empirical evidence for a two-stage phenomenon, Memory, 18:8, 831-844 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2010.510476

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MEMORY, 2010, 18 (8), 831844

Childhood amnesia: Empirical evidence for a two-stage phenomenon

Fiona Jack and Harlene Hayne University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
The term childhood amnesia refers to the inability of adults to remember events from their infancy and early childhood. If we plot the number of memories that adults can recall as a function of age during childhood, the number of memories reported increases gradually as a function of age. Typically, this finding has been used to argue that gradual changes in memory development contribute to a gradual decline in childhood amnesia during the preschool period. Alternatively, it is possible that pooling data across participants has obscured more abrupt, stage-like changes in the remission of childhood amnesia. In the present study we examined the number and distribution of childhood memories for individual participants. Six adults were repeatedly interviewed about their childhood memories. We found that the distribution of adults early childhood memories may be less continuous than pooled data suggest. This finding has important implications for current explanations of childhood amnesia.

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Keywords: Autobiographical memory; Childhood amnesia.

Freud (1905/1953) emphasised the importance of early experiences, arguing that they have a lasting impact throughout the lifespan. Given his focus on early experience Freud found it somewhat paradoxical that, as adults, we recall little or nothing of these early, formative experiences. Freuds solution to this paradox was that our early experiences remain stored in memory and continue to influence our thoughts and behaviour, but because of their predominantly sexual and aggressive nature these memories are actively repressed from consciousness (Freud, 1925/1950). Although Freuds explanation for the paucity of adults early memories is no longer widely accepted, the terms infantile amnesia and childhood amnesia, which he coined to describe the phenomenon, are part of his lasting legacy. Since Freud, theorists have taken a more developmental approach, arguing that factors such as brain

maturation (Bachevalier, 1992; Newcombe, Lloyd, & Ratliff, 2007), language acquisition (Nelson, 1993; Simcock & Hayne, 2002), and the establishment of a self-concept (Howe & Courage, 1993, 1997) contribute to the emergence of autobiographical memory and the associated offset of childhood amnesia. Although contemporary theories of childhood amnesia focus on different aspects of development, they all draw, at least in part, on empirical studies of adults early memories for clues about the timing and nature of the transition that is central to their particular theory. In some empirical studies of childhood amnesia, adult participants are asked to identify and date their earliest memory. These studies consistently show that, on average, adults earliest memories are for events that occurred between their third and fourth birthdays, although individual adults may have

Address correspondence to: Harlene Hayne, Department of Psychology, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand. E-mail: hayne@psy.otago.ac.nz This research was supported by a Marsden Grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand to Harlene Hayne. Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a New Zealand Science & Technology Postdoctoral Fellowship to Fiona Jack. We thank Nicola Davis for her help with coding.

# 2010 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business http://www.psypress.com/memory DOI:10.1080/09658211.2010.510476

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significantly earlier or later first memories than this mean (Dudycha & Dudycha, 1933a, 1933b; Howes, Siegel, & Brown, 1993; Jack & Hayne, 2007; Kihlstrom & Harackiewcz, 1982; MacDonald, Uesiliana, & Hayne, 2000; McCabe, Capron, & Peterson, 1991; Mullen, 1994; Rabbitt & McInnis, 1988; West & Bauer, 1999). Because it is often difficult to determine when a remembered event occurred, some researchers have instead asked adults what they can recall about a specific event for which the exact date is known, such as the birth of a younger sibling. Consistent with studies involving participants single earliest memory, Sheingold and Tenney (1982) found that adults could not remember their siblings birth if it had happened before they were 3 years old, but most adults could remember something about the event if it had occurred when they were 4 or older. In contrast to this finding, subsequent authors using the targeted event method concluded that it might be more appropriate to place the offset of childhood amnesia at 2 years of age (Eacott & Crawley, 1998, 1999; Usher & Neisser, 1993), although the reliability of these earlier estimates has been debated (Davis, Gross, & Hayne, 2008; Loftus, 1993). The studies described above tell us the very earliest age from which events can be recalled in adulthood, but it appears that this is only one aspect of childhood amnesia. Broader samples of adults memories suggest that childhood amnesia persists well beyond the single earliest memory. For example, Wetzler and Sweeney (1986) demonstrated that when adults memories are sampled from across the lifespan, the number of events recalled from ages 6 and below is lower than the number that would be expected on the basis of the rates at which memories are recalled from older ages. Given these data, Wetzler and Sweeney concluded that, although adults do have a small number of early memories from the preschool years, childhood amnesia continues to limit autobiographical memory until at least 5 years of age. Other researchers have sampled memories from the childhood years and examined the distribution of memories across this period. In one classic study, for example, Waldfogel (1948) asked 124 adults to note all of the memories that they could recall from before they were 8 years old, and to estimate their age at the time of each event. Waldfogel plotted the total number of memories recalled (across all participants) as a

function of age at encoding. The function he obtained demonstrated a smooth increase in the number of memories retained each year, with the highest rate of increase occurring between 3 and 6 years of age. These data have now been replicated several times, both in studies where exhaustive recall of childhood memories is requested (Crovitz & Harvey, 1979), and in studies where cue words are used to sample adults childhood memories (Crovitz, Harvey, & McKee, 1980; Crovitz & Quina-Holland, 1976). On the basis of data like these, Newcombe et al. (2007) have argued that the amnesia we experience for our earliest experiences is best conceptualised as a two-stage phenomenon. Historically, the terms childhood amnesia and infantile amnesia have been used interchangeably to refer to a single, unitary phenomenon, but Newcombe et al. argued that there is, . . . an early two-year period of dense amnesia, from which people remember close to nothing, and a subsequent period lasting about 3 to 5 years during which amnesia is lifting, but from which people retain some spotty and uneven memories (2007, p. 38). According to Newcombe et al. the early, dense amnesia is best referred to as infantile amnesia and the subsequent partial amnesia is best referred to as childhood amnesia. This twostage conceptualisation of childhood amnesia was foreshadowed by Freuds (1899/1950, p. 49) observation that an individual whose earliest memory is from the first year or two of life may then retain further detached memories from the following years but that it is not until somewhat later, perhaps the fifth year of life, that he will be able to reproduce his experiences as a continuous chain (see also Nelson, 1993; Nelson & Fivush, 2004). The data published by Waldfogel (1948) and by Wetzler and Sweeney (1986) appear to support the view that childhood amnesia continues to restrict memory into middle childhood, well beyond the encoding of an individuals earliest memory, as argued by Freud (1899/1950) and Newcombe et al. (2007). Alternatively, however, it is also possible that childhood amnesia does end with an individuals earliest memory and that the gradual remission that has been documented in the past emerges only because data are averaged across participants. That is, the rapid increase in the number of childhood memories that occurred in Waldfogels and Wetzler and Sweeneys data sets as a function of age at event may simply reflect the staggered emergence of

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autobiographical memory across participants. As long as data are collapsed across participants, we cannot determine whether the relative amnesia that appears to follow the early absolute amnesia is a real phenomenon or a statistical artefact.1 If Freud (1899/1950) and Newcombe et al. (2007) are correct and the early dense amnesia is followed by a period of relative amnesia, this raises another question: how are the memories that are encoded during the later childhood amnesia period distributed? For example, Freud (1899/1950, p. 49) and Newcombe et al. (2007, p. 38) describe these memories as detached, spotty, and uneven, which seems to imply that just a few isolated, scattered memories survive from the period of relative amnesia. Elsewhere, however, Newcombe et al. (2007, p. 42) describe childhood amnesia as a period during which autobiographical recall is increasing rapidly, implying a steady, systematic emergence of autobiographical memory over this period. Similarly, Nelson (1993, p. 12) argues that studies with adults demonstrate a sparse but increasing number of memories in the later preschool years. These latter descriptions are consistent with the smooth slope obtained by Waldfogel (1948) and other authors who sampled adults memories across childhood. Again, however, it is important to note that these distributions of adults early memories are based on data that were collapsed across participants. It is possible that averaging data across participants obscures discontinuities in individual adults early recollections, making the emergence of autobiographical memory across the childhood amnesia period appear to be a smoother and more continuous process than it actually is. In order to establish the true nature of the emergence of autobiographical memory, it is necessary to examine the distribution of the early memories of individual adults in the absence of averaging. The main purpose of the present study was to examine the distribution and content of early memories for individual adults. Like Waldfogel (1948) and Crovitz and Harvey (1979), we aimed to elicit exhaustive recall of participants early
1 This same issue dominated early discussions about the process of learning when many researchers observed that the smooth learning curves that were produced by averaging data across participants did not reflect the performance of individual participants who each learned in an all-or-none fashion (e.g., Bower, 1961; Brainerd & Howe, 1978; Estes, 1960).

memories. Specifically, participants were asked to describe all of the memories that they could recall for events that occurred during the first 610 years of life. There were, however, at least three important differences between the present study and previous exhaustive studies of adults early memories. First, in studies of adults early memories, participants are typically asked to provide written descriptions of the memories that they recall. In the present study, on the other hand, participants were asked to describe their memories orally during individual interviews with the researcher. Because reminiscing typically occurs in a social context, we believed that describing their memories to an interviewer would feel more natural and be less demanding for participants than providing written descriptions. If this were the case, participants might be more willing to persist in this somewhat daunting task. Second, before each participant was interviewed about his or her memories a personalised timeline was constructed, featuring several photographs of him or her at various target ages (Jack, MacDonald, Reese, & Hayne, 2009; Tustin & Hayne, 2010). The purpose of the timeline was to provide participants with an external cue to help them to recall and date events experienced at different ages. Pillemer and White (1989) recognised that identifying and reporting ones earliest memories out of context is a somewhat unusual and difficult task. The timeline, along with the conversational style of the interviews in the present study, provided more contextual support for participants than is typically provided when adults are asked to report their early memories. Third, we asked participants parents to evaluate the accuracy of their recollections and the dating of their memories. Although parents own memories of events may not be entirely veridical, parental verification is widely used as a way to measure the accuracy of autobiographical memories (see, for example, Bruce, Dolan, & PhillipsGrant, 2000; Eacott & Crawley, 1998, 1999; Howes et al., 1993; Sheingold & Tenney, 1982; Usher & Neisser, 1993) and allows us to have more confidence in the accuracy of participants reports and the assignment of memories to specific childhood ages. In addition to their early memories, we also asked all participants to report some memories from older childhood and adolescence (ages 10, 16, and 19 years). As Newcombe et al. (2007) point out, studies of early memories rarely

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include memories from older childhood and adolescence, making developmental comparisons difficult. Other authors have suggested that not only are our very early memories fewer in number than those recalled from later in life, but they may also be more fragmentary in nature and contain less detail (Bruce et al., 2005; Newcombe et al., 2007; Pillemer & White, 1989). While we did not elicit exhaustive recall of participants memories from these older ages, we can compare aspects of the memories from the childhood amnesia period, later childhood and beyond, such as how much is remembered about the event and the accuracy with which the event is recalled.

2-year-old, a 3-year-old, a 4-year-old, a 5-yearold, a 6-year-old, a 7-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 9year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 16-year-old. In addition, the researcher took a photograph of the participant using a digital camera during an initial visit prior to the first memory interview. A copy of each photograph was placed directly above or below the appropriate age marker on the timeline.

Procedure
We conducted two memory interviews with each participant to ensure that we captured as many of their early memories as possible. Participants who have been asked to recall their earliest memories on more than one occasion often recall earlier memories than participants who are asked to perform the task for the first time (Kihlstrom & Harackiewcz, 1982; Mullen, 1994). Furthermore, the number of childhood memories reported by adults can increase when they are asked to recall their memories over multiple sessions (Waldfogel, 1948), as can the number of details recalled about a given episode (La Rooy, Pipe, & Murray, 2005). Each participant visited the researcher on three occasions, separated by 1-week intervals. During the first visit the participants informed consent was obtained and his or her photograph was taken so that it could be used on the timeline during subsequent visits. During the second visit participants were interviewed about their autobiographical memories. The researcher began each interview by explaining to the participant that he or she would be asked to describe some memories from the past. The researcher reviewed the sequence of the timeline with the participant. The researcher explained that the timeline started at the participants birth and stopped at the participants present age, and represented his or her whole life so far. The timeline activity was performed to reinforce the notion of a linear time sequence, and to provide an external cue for thinking about memories from different epochs of the participants life. The participant was instructed to tell the researcher only the details of his or her memories that he or she actually remembered, and not to fill in any blanks with details obtained from family stories, photos, or videos. The interview itself then started with the researcher asking the participant to describe a

METHOD
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Participants
Participants were 6 adults (3 males, 3 females) recruited through the local student employment agency and by word of mouth. All participants were undergraduate students, aged 19 years (range: 19 years, 6 months to 19 years, 11 months), and English was their first language. Each participant was paid $10 per hour for taking part in the study.

Materials
A personalised timeline was used to interview each participant, similar to that used by Tustin and Hayne (2010). The timeline was drawn on red card (240 cm by 66 cm). A 1-cm-wide line measuring 220 cm in length was drawn horizontally in the centre of the card with a metallic silver pen. Vertical lines marking each year of the participants life were drawn at equal intervals along the horizontal line, and measured 6 cm in length. The corresponding age was written beneath each vertical line (e.g., [participants name] is born!, 1 year old, 2 years old, . . . 19 years old). The timeline was mounted on the wall in the interview room. Prior to each participants first memory interview, his or her parents were contacted by the researcher and were asked to provide photographs of the participant at various ages. Parents were asked to provide a photograph of the participant as a newborn, a 1-year-old, a

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recent memory. This allowed the participant to be familiarised with the style of questioning that would be used throughout the interview, before moving on to the ostensibly more difficult task of recalling and describing their very early memories. The researcher asked the participant to think of something that he or she remembered doing or happening in the last month or so. When asking this question, the researcher pointed to the recent photograph at age 19 on the timeline. Once the participant had nominated an event, the researcher asked him or her to report as much information as possible about the event. During this free-recall phase of the interview, the researcher only provided very general prompts (e.g., Tell me about [the event], followed by Can you remember anything else about [the event]?) until the participant indicated that he or she did not have any more information to report. To ensure that the participants memory description was as complete as possible, the researcher then asked a set of four specific questions about the memory. The questions were: Who else was there?, Where were you?, What did you do?, and How did you feel?. The questions were followed by another opportunity for free recall, e.g., Is there anything else that you can remember now that you would like to tell me about [the event]?. After the participant had finished talking about his or her recent memory, the researcher shifted the focus to the other end of the timeline. The researcher asked whether the participant could remember anything that he or she had done or that had happened before his or her first birthday. For each memory the participant recalled, the sequence of free recall and specific questions described above was repeated. When the participant had told the researcher about all of the events that he or she could recall for before his or her first birthday, the researcher repeated the procedure for memories of events that took place when the participant was 1 year old (between his or her first and second birthdays). This procedure was repeated, year by year, for at least the first 6 years of life. In this way, the participant was asked to report all of the memories that he or she could recall for events which occurred before his or her sixth birthday. If the participant had recalled over 20 memories, the interview stopped there. Otherwise the interview continued, year by year, stopping once the participant had recalled over 20 memories or,

if this did not occur, the interview stopped after the participant had recalled all the memories he or she could for events that occurred at 10 years of age. Two females were interviewed about ages 05 years; one male was interviewed about ages 06 years; one female was interviewed about ages 09 years; and two males were interviewed about ages 010 years. The researcher then asked the participant if he or she could recall any other memories from the ages that they had talked about. The sequence of free recall and specific questions was repeated for each new memory the participant recalled, and the participant was asked to estimate his or her age at the time of each event. When the participant could recall no additional memories, the researcher asked whether the earliest memory the participant had reported during the interview was in fact his or her earliest memory. If it was not, the researcher asked the participant to describe and date his or her earliest memory. During the third visit, the researcher began by going over the same instructions for the task as had been given the previous week. In addition the participant was instructed to report all the memories he or she could recall, regardless of whether he or she had reported the same memory during the first interview. The researcher then asked the participant to recall one memory of something he or she did or that happened at 16 years of age, and one memory for when he or she was 10 years old. For each memory, the same questioning procedure was used as for the first interview. The researcher then asked the participant to tell her about all of the events that he or she could recall from specific childhood ages, starting at the oldest age that they had talked about the previous week, and working backwards year by year to the first year of life. The researcher then asked the participant to tell her about any other memories from those ages that he or she had not reported already. Finally, the researcher once again established what the participants earliest memory was. All memory interviews were transcribed verbatim. If an event had been described during both interviews, the new details reported on the second occasion were added to those reported on the first occasion, and repetitions were discarded. If the age assigned to a memory on the second occasion was inconsistent with the age assigned to the same memory on the first occasion, the participant was contacted and was asked to verify which date they considered to be the more

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accurate. Only two participants were contacted for this purpose; between them, they were asked to verify a total of eight age estimates. To assess the accuracy of participants memory descriptions and age estimates, the transcripts of the interviews were presented to the participants parents. For each memory, parents were asked to first read over the memory description and indicate whether the event had definitely happened, might have happened, or had definitely never happened. If the event had definitely happened, the parents were asked to indicate whether they had some first-hand knowledge of it. If they did, they went through each piece of information (i.e., each line of the transcript) and rated it as correct, possible, or incorrect. In this way, only parents who had some first-hand knowledge of the event rated the accuracy of the details provided by their child about the event. The parents were also asked to indicate whether their childs estimation of his or her age at the time of the event was correct or incorrect. If the age was incorrect, or spanned more than 1 year (e.g., 6 or 7), they were asked to provide the correct age. If a parent made a correction, the age given by the parent was used in subsequent analyses. For 10% of the childhood memories in our sample (memories for events experienced at 010 years of age), parents were not sure of the age at which the event occurred. Parents agreed with participants dating on 76% of the childhood memories, narrowed the participants original estimate to 1 year of age for 3.5%, and disagreed with participants dating on 10.5% of the memories. When disagreements occurred, the participants estimate had usually been within 1 year of the parents estimate. These data are comparable to those of Usher and Neisser (1993): in their study, 15% of the memories subject to parental verification were assigned to a different age by the parent.

Coding
Almost all of the memories in this study could be assigned to a particular year of age by the participant and/or his or her parent. For three of the memories, the estimated age at event spanned 2 years. These memories were each assigned to the midpoint of the age range. For example, the midpoint of the age range 34 years was

considered to be 4 years, 0 months; therefore one memory with age at event estimated at 34 years was assigned to age 4 (Female 1); one memory with age at event estimated at 56 years was assigned to age 6 (Female 2); and one memory with age at event estimated at 910 years was assigned to age 10 (Male 1). Memories were not included in subsequent analyses if the estimate of the participants age at the time of the event spanned more than 2 years. Two memories were discarded for this reason, both from Male 1 (the estimated ages for the discarded memories were 35 years and 811 years). Only memories in which a specific event was described were included in the analyses. For example, memories in which participants described the way a bathroom used to look, or a game they had played several times, which included no evidence that they were recalling a specific instance, were not included. A small number of descriptions that were treated as a single memory during the interview seemed to contain more than one specific event. Conversely, some descriptions that were treated as separate memories during the interview seemed to describe different aspects of the same central event. In order to deal with these cases consistently, episodes that were separated in time were each coded as independent events; episodes that followed each other directly in time were coded as a single event. For example, one participant described taking part in a science competition at school and then making a trip to the university where he received a prize for his science project. Although the competition and the trip were treated as one memory during the interview, they were coded as two separate memories because the two episodes occurred on different days. Another participant described getting a new dog, introducing it to her auntys dog, and discussing the dogs with her aunty during dinner as three separate memories during the interview. Because these three events followed each other directly in time, they were coded as a single (albeit rich) memory. In total, the final sample included 192 memories, for events that occurred when participants were aged 0 to 19 years. Bruce et al. (2005) observed that some memories, particularly very early memories, are retained as fragmentary recollections rather than coherent events in our minds. They described a memory fragment as a disconnected piece

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of memory . . . nothing more than an isolated fragment that sticks in your mind (p. 571), whereas an event memory is like a story with a beginning and an end, with some specific details and background information able to be recalled. To measure whether memories from the childhood amnesia period tended to be more fragmentary than later memories, two coders read each memory description and decided whether it should be classified as a fragment or an event memory on the basis of Bruce et al.s description. Inter-rater reliability*agreements / (agreements' disagreements)*was 96%. Disagreements were resolved through discussion. To obtain a measure of the amount of information reported about each memory, repetitions were removed from the participants memory descriptions, as were descriptions of subsequent reflection on the event (e.g., and Dads like I remember that and mum reckons theres a photo of it but I havent seen one); details that the participant reported but didnt actually remember (e.g., I dont actually remember seeing him but apparently he had all this blood coming out of his head); and discussion of the participants age at the time of the event (e.g., it was before I was 5). Each memory description was then subjected to a word count, using Microsoft Word for Windows. Research in our laboratory has shown that word count is highly correlated with the number of clauses that a memory description contains, and Dickinson and Poole (2000) demonstrated that word count is highly correlated with the number of syntactic units that a memory description contains. As described above, parents were asked to assess the accuracy of the memories. For those events for which they had first-hand knowledge, parents were asked to determine the accuracy of each detail of the memory description. To do this parents were asked to rate each detail as correct, possible, or incorrect. Occasionally, a parent would fail to assign a statement to one of these categories; in these instances, the information was included in the possible category. In two cases parents noted that certain details were correct, but were not part of the event that the participant was describing. Because this information was not strictly incorrect, it was included in a fourth category, intrusions. Because intrusions constituted only 0.4% of the information that was

assessed for accuracy, this category was not included in subsequent analyses.

RESULTS
The primary purpose of the present study was to examine the emergence of autobiographical memory for individual adults. Figure 1 shows the total number of unique memories reported by each participant as a function of his or her age at the time of the event. The individual data shown in Figure 1 illustrate two important points. First, each participant recalled a small number of isolated memories very early in development. Second, each participant exhibited a noticeable increase in the number of memories recalled during the late preschool or early school years. This increase occurred at age 4 for the three female participants and one male participant, and at age 6 for the other two male participants. Collapsing the data across the sample did not yield a smooth function like that typically seen in research of this kind, but this finding was undoubtedly due to the small number of participants. Across a much larger sample, there is no reason to suspect that the shape of the curve
25 20 15 10 5

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F1

M1

Number of events recalled

0 25 20 15 10 5 0 25 20 15 10 5 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

F2

M2

F3

M3

Age at event (years)

Figure 1. Total number of events recalled by each participant as a function of age at event. Each graph shows the number of memories the participant reported for the ages about which he or she was interviewed exhaustively. These ages were 05 years for F1 and F2, 09 years for F3, 010 years for M1 and M2, and 06 years for M3.

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would not be very similar to that previously obtained by others (e.g., Crovitz & Quina-Holland, 1976; Waldfogel, 1948).

Earliest memories
In order to calculate the mean age of participants single earliest memories, we assigned each participants earliest memory an age in months. As in previous studies (Jack & Hayne, 2007; Jack et al., 2009), if the most specific information we had about when an event had occurred was in whole years, we assigned the memory to the midpoint of that year (e.g., events assigned by participants or parents to 2 years of age were estimated to have occurred at 30 months of age). Across participants, the mean age of earliest memory was 23 months (range: 1130 months). Participants earliest memories were for events that ranged from mundane events, such as watching an older sister getting into bed or watching a man paint lines on the road, to distinctive and atypical events, such as having a chest x-ray during a bout of pneumonia or visiting a zoo in Australia.

One other participants earliest memory was also judged to be a fragment; this memory was for an event that occurred at 20 months of age. The earliest memories of the remaining four participants were classified as full event memories; these were for events that occurred at 11 months of age (one participant) or 30 months of age (three participants).

Amount reported
All memories*fragments and full event memories*were included in the analysis of amount reported. Figure 2 shows the mean amount of information each participant reported about his or her memories as a function of his or her age at the time of the event. These data suggest that the amount that participants could recall about events increased linearly as a function of the age in childhood at which the event occurred. To assess potential age-related changes in the amount of information that participants reported about the events that they recalled, we also calculated the mean number of words reported per memory across participants as a function of age and fitted a linear function to these data (before these means were calculated, four outliers
300

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Fragments vs event memories

Across all participants, the vast majority of the reports were coded as full event memories; only 7 of the 192 memories that made up the total sample were classified as fragments. With the exception of one fragment that was dated to 5 years of age, fragment memories were restricted to the preschool period. Two of the three memories recalled from 1 year of age were fragments, as were four of the 39 memories from 4 years of age. An example of a fragment is provided below. This fragment was Female 3s earliest memory, for something that happened when she was 18 months old: I was standing up in the cot and um I just remember looking at this woman who was getting into this bed . . . but thats just a random memory . . . it was night time and it was dark . . . and she had blonde hair and thats it really . . . I had a feeling that she was getting into my bed as well, so I think it might have been my room.

F1
200

M1

Mean number of words reported per event

100 0 300

F2
200 100 0 300

M2

F3
200 100 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

M3

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Age at event (years)

Figure 2. Mean number of words reported per event by each participant as a function of age at event. Each graph shows the mean number of words the participant reported for the ages about which he or she was interviewed exhaustively. These ages were 05 years for F1 and F2, 09 years for F3, 010 years for M1 and M2, and 06 years for M3.

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Mean number of words reported

TABLE 1 Mean proportion of information that was judged by parents to be correct, possible, or incorrect, as a function of age at event Mean proportion correct .73 .74 .85 .74 .72 .77 .87 .87 .92 .74 .53 Mean proportion possible .17 .14 .14 .22 .26 .17 .10 .13 .08 .26 .47 Mean proportion incorrect .10 .12 .02 .02 .01 .06 .03 .00 .00 .00 .00

400

300

Age at event (whole years) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 16

200

100

10

15

20

Age at event (years)

Figure 3. Mean (9 SE) number of words reported per event as a function of age at event and the best-tting linear function; f 0 y(0) ' ax; y(0) 0 116.5, a 0 10.1.

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were excluded from the data set). As shown in Figure 3, the linear function provided a good fit (r 0 .89) with a positive slope, indicating that as a participants age at the time of an event increased, so did the amount of information that he or she recalled about the event.

Accuracy
Parents indicated that 147 (77%) of the events that were reported by our participants had definitely happened, and 43 (22%) of the events might have happened. For the remaining two events the parent failed to indicate whether the event definitely happened, might have happened, or definitely did not happen. In no case did a parent indicate that an event definitely did not happen. Parents reported having first-hand knowledge of 113 (59%) of the events, some first-hand knowledge of 19 (10%) of the events, and no first-hand knowledge of 60 (31%) of the events. Table 1 shows parents mean ratings of the accuracy of the information reported about events of which they had at least some firsthand knowledge (i.e., 69% of the memories; no parents had first-hand knowledge of events that occurred at 19 years of age). On average, the majority of the information that participants reported about events that took place when they were 010 years old was considered accurate by their parents (78% overall). Very little information was considered incorrect (mean 0 3%). The remaining information (mean 0 19%) was rated by the parents as possible. In contrast, for events that occurred at 16 years of age, parents rated a lower percentage of the information as

correct, and a higher percentage as possible. It is likely that this trend simply reflects the smaller role that parents play in day-to-day events as a child gets older. Based on participants descriptions of events that occurred at 16 years of age, it was clear that, while parents could claim some first-hand knowledge, they were typically absent during the central part of the event. To assess differences in the accuracy of the memories reported as a function of age at event, the proportion of information considered correct, the proportion of information considered possible, and the proportion of information considered incorrect were subjected to separate one-way ANOVAs, with age at event as a between-participants variable (11 levels). There were no significant effects, although the effect of age at event on the proportion of information considered possible approached conventional levels of significance, F(10, 121) 0 1.89, MSE 0 0.04, p 0 .053. The accuracy data for individual participants were highly consistent with the trends reported here.

DISCUSSION
The overarching goal of the present study was to examine the decline of childhood amnesia for individual adult participants. We found that each participants very earliest memory was for an event that occurred prior to his or her third birthday, but this initial glimmer of autobiographical memory did not signal the end of childhood amnesia. Participants autobiographical memories were sparse and sporadic for the first 46 years of life.

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At 46 years of age, all participants memory distributions showed a noticeable increase in the number of memories recalled per year. Taken together, these data are consistent with Newcombe et al.s (2007) proposal that rather than a single unitary phenomenon, childhood amnesia may be more accurately characterised as a twostage process: an absolute amnesia for the first few years of life, followed by a relative amnesia for events that occurred during the later preschool years; with adult levels of remembering in place by 7 years of age. Having established that the period of relative amnesia is a genuine phenomenon and not just a product of averaging data across participants, our second question addressed the way in which memories are distributed across this period. Prior studies in which data were pooled across participants suggest that autobiographical memories increase gradually in frequency across the period of relative amnesia. In contrast, our current data suggest that individual adults memories for this period are isolated and infrequent; the smooth slopes obtained in prior studies may have emerged only because data were collapsed across participants. This interpretation is highly reminiscent of early debates about the process of learning. Many early researchers challenged the notion that learned responses were acquired gradually*an inference drawn from the smooth learning curves that were produced by pooled data. Instead of learning gradually, individual participants exhibited abrupt, stage-like changes in performance that occurred at different rates across participants (Bower, 1961; Brainerd & Howe, 1978; Estes, 1960).

Earliest memories
Although studies of adults early memories usually include some memories from 1 or 2 years of age (Bruce et al., 2000; Crovitz & Harvey, 1979; Crovitz et al., 1980; Dudycha & Dudycha, 1933a, 1933b; Henri & Henri, 1898; Howes et al., 1993; Kihlstrom & Harackiewcz, 1982; MacDonald et al., 2000; McCabe et al., 1991; Waldfogel, 1948; West & Bauer, 1999), on average, most adults earliest memories are for events that occurred between their third and fourth birthdays (Dudycha & Dudycha, 1933a, 1933b; Henri & Henri, 1898; Howes et al., 1993; Jack & Hayne, 2007; Kihlstrom & Harackiewcz, 1982; MacDonald et al., 2000; McCabe et al., 1991; Mullen, 1994; Rabbitt &

McInnis, 1988; West & Bauer, 1999). In contrast, on average, our participants earliest memories were for events that occurred at 23 months of age, and all participants recalled something that occurred before their 3rd birthday. How can we account for this difference between our data and those from other studies? One possible explanation is that, by chance, our sample happened to include a disproportionately high number of people with very early memories. A second possibility is that the low mean age of the earliest memories reported in the present study was due to the use of the personalised timeline, which provided participants with external support for recalling and dating their early memories. Although it is possible that the timeline helped participants to retrieve earlier memories than they might have without it, we think that the impact of the timeline on the age of earliest memory might be minimal. In a prior study that involved a single interview with a similar timeline, for example, Tustin and Hayne (2010) found that 18- to 20-year-old participants reported earliest memories with a mean age of 3.21 years, which is within the typical range. Another methodological difference between our study and many other surveys of early memories was that our interviewer guided participants through a systematic and exhaustive search of their early memories. Other authors have argued that identifying ones single earliest memory is quite a difficult task, and participants asked to do this may simply report, for example, the most vivid or coherent of multiple early memories (Newcombe et al., 2007; Pillemer & White, 1989). This view implies that earlier memories may be available for recollection should a more thorough and systematic search be conducted. In our opinion, it is likely that our intensive and thorough one-on-one interviews facilitated participants recall of very early memories that may not otherwise have been reported. At least two pieces of evidence from other studies are consistent with this interpretation of our data. First, when Wang, Conway, and Hou (2004) asked participants to recall as many memories as they could for events that occurred before their sixth birthday, they also obtained a younger mean age of earliest memory than is typically obtained when only the single earliest memory is requested (approximately 2 years, 7 months for their Western participants). Second, in the present study, despite all participants recalling at least some new memories at the second interview, only

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one participant reported a new earliest memory. At the first interview, Female 2s earliest memory was for an event that occurred at 22 months of age, but at the second interview she recalled something that had happened when she was aged 1822 months. In contrast, when Kihlstrom and Harackiewcz (1982) asked 105 participants to report their single earliest memory on two occasions, 42% reported a different memory the second time, with the new memory often from a younger age than that originally reported. This pattern suggests that any given sample of single earliest memories may not capture all participants absolute earliest memories. In contrast, it is likely that the exhaustive approach taken in the present study increased the probability that participants absolute earliest memories would in fact be among the memories reported, thus minimising changes in earliest memories between interviews. It is also possible that the exhaustive interview used in the present study led to our capturing some very early memory fragments which would not usually be reported when adults single earliest memories are sampled. When Bruce et al. (2005) asked adults to report the earliest memory fragment that they could remember, they obtained significantly earlier memories than when they asked adults to report the earliest personal event they could remember. Perhaps fragment memories are initially filtered out when participants are asked to report their earliest memory, but were included in the current study where the intensive one-on-one interview encouraged exhaustive reports of all early recollections. On the basis of Bruce et als definition, two of our participants earliest memories were categorised as fragments. When we excluded fragment memories from the sample, the mean age of our participants earliest memories was 2 years. This mean is still notably earlier than typical samples of adults earliest memories, but is highly consistent with Wang et al.s (2004) mean age of 2 years, 7 months, which was also obtained using an exhaustive method.

Quality of early memories

While there appear to be stage-like changes in the density of memories as a function of age in childhood, the other aspects of the memories that we examined showed either a gradual agerelated change or no change at all. For example, the amount of information participants reported about the events they recalled increased steadily

across the period of relative childhood amnesia. Furthermore, as shown in Figure 3, the amount reported continued to increase steadily across adolescence. In contrast to the conclusions that are typically drawn on the basis of adults early memories, this finding might suggest that autobiographical memory development extends beyond middle childhood. However, studies in which memories are sampled from across the lifespan show that changes in the frequency of autobiographical memories beyond 10 years of age might be more strongly influenced by normal forgetting and recency effects (and, for older adults, by reminiscence) than by memory development per se (Rubin, Wetzler, & Nebes, 1986) and it is possible that the volume of memories might also be affected by these processes (although see Tustin & Hayne, 2005). The accuracy of participants recall showed no systematic change as a function of the age at which the event occurred. This finding is consistent with prior studies which have shown that, although adults report less confidence in the accuracy of their early memories compared with later childhood memories (West & Bauer, 1999), the accuracy with which events are recalled does not vary (Howes et al., 1993). The differential developmental trends we observed in the number, volume, and accuracy of early memories suggest that there may be some dissociation between these aspects of autobiographical memory during development. Recent prospective longitudinal data collected with children are consistent with this possibility. Using factor analysis, Reese, Jack, and White (in press) found that the age of adolescents earliest memories, the density of their early memories, and the amount they could recall about their early memories all loaded onto different factors. Furthermore, when Reese et al. examined relations between these factors and a number of variables that they had measured when participants were 19 to 51 months of age (such as self-recognition, theory of mind, and language skills), it appeared that the different aspects of the adolescents early memories had been driven by different variables during early development.

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Explaining a two-stage model of childhood amnesia

On the basis of the present findings, we argue that the basic capacity to encode and retain

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autobiographical memories emerges very early in development, allowing us to store and retain a small handful of very early memories. It is important to note that the mean age of the single earliest memories reported by our participants (23 months) is highly consistent with predictions drawn on the basis of Howe and Courages (1993, 1997) theory, which identifies the advent of the self concept at 1824 months of age as a crucial factor in the emergence of autobiographical memory. In addition, we argue that the basic capacity for autobiographical memory also relies on neurological maturation and the acquisition of language during the second year of life (see Hayne & Jack, in press). Following the end of the dense amnesia period, further neurological maturation and developments in language set the stage for a number of additional achievements that are believed to facilitate autobiographical memory. For example, Nelson (1993) argued that the ability to use language as a retrieval cue emerges during the late preschool years. The delayed acquisition of this skill, which is a key factor in the ability to maintain memories over long periods of time, may explain the transition to adult levels of remembering at 46 years of age. The developmental milestones described above set certain parameters on our ability to recall childhood events. The distribution of any given individuals childhood memories, including the age of his or her earliest memory, will be influenced by environmental factors that contribute to these achievements, such as the early narrative environment (Jack et al., 2009). On the basis of the current data, we argue that the distribution of an individuals memories will also be influenced by non-developmental factors such as the nature of the events that he or she experiences and the relative accessibility of all available memories at the time at the time of retrieval. For example, the memory distributions we obtained appeared to be influenced by the ability of some distinctive experiences, such as moving to a new house or visiting another country, to cue participants recall of a number of associated memories (see also MacDonald et al., 2000; Mullen, 1994; Usher & Neisser, 1993). Conversely, it is likely that these distributions were also influenced by a lack of effective cues for many memories. Indeed, during the interviews participants themselves appealed to the difficulty of accessing their memories without appropriate retrieval cues. For example, one

participant commented, If I really thought about it I could remember quite a lot more but just I need stuff to remind me. Thus, without adequate cues, it may never be possible to obtain a truly exhaustive account of any individuals autobiographical memories. Furthermore, given that memory processes during infancy and early childhood are characterised by encoding specificity in the extreme, our early memories may be particularly elusive (Hayne, 2006; see also Hayne & Jack, in press).

Conclusion
The main purpose of the present study was to examine the characteristics of childhood amnesia for individual adults. Our data are consistent with a two-stage model of childhood amnesia. They suggest that childhood amnesia ends at around 46 years of age, although a few isolated earlier memories also survive into adulthood. Given the complexity of childhood amnesia, we hypothesise that theories based on a single age-related change in memory development are likely to be inadequate. Instead, it is more likely that a number of developmental achievements play a role in this two-stage phenomenon.
Manuscript received 28 February 2010 Manuscript accepted 2 July 2010 First published online 4 October 2010

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