Earliest Memories? The phenonenon of childhood amnesia

Here's a research question that has long intrigued me, a person's oldest memory. My oldest memory is from about three years of age. We lived in Bogota, Colombia at the time. I remember looking out the window at the stairway landing at a distant Andean peak that, apparently, was only visible every now and then because of the weather.

As a parent, I have informally tested my children from time to time about their memories. Once, I asked my oldest if he remembered visiting the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum a year after his last visit. He was about five years old at the time and he did not remember. I probed, and asked if he remembered what animal was just inside the main doors in the museum's rotunda. He still did not remember.

Here is what he did not remember, the giant elephant:

When discussing memory in class, I often ask students to recall their oldest memories. Sometimes the answers are quite extreme. Some students claim to recall salient events before they turned two years of age, while others are at a loss to recall anything before age five.

With the above as introduction, I found Wang's recent article quite apropos. Its title is: Where Does Our Past Begin? A Sociocultural Perspective on the Phenomenon of Childhood Amnesia. Here is a link to it.

Wang summarizes the data on childhood amnesia. Looks at theoretical attempts to explain it and proposes that childhood amnesia may vary socioculturally.