Sophie McBain (The big idea: are memories fact or fiction?, 11 September) raises some interesting questions about “infantile amnesia”, a phenomenon first named by Sigmund Freud. In recent years, research into infantile amnesia has provided data on the impact of social factors on childhood memory development.
Experiments have shown, for example, that more elaborate parental conversation with children between 20 and 29 months was associated with subsequently more detailed accounts of personal memories by the children.
Also, Prof Qi Wang of Cornell University has presented data showing that the age at which infantile amnesia ends is around six months later in Chinese or Korean children, when compared with children from white North American backgrounds. Her argument is that this is explained, in part, by a conversational style in East Asian mothers that emphasises socialisation into the wider community, rather than individual experience and autonomy.
These findings are in line with an earlier school of memory research that showed that memories are, in fact, based on “schemata” that include imported elements from our current social environment.
Meanwhile, Lynn Nadel and Morris Moscovitch, in their work on hippocampal function, have argued that each act of memory retrieval is actually an act of reconstruction of that memory. This approach to memory shows that it can be manipulated by social actors, a phenomenon well-known by political communicators.
Jonathon O’Brien
University of Liverpool
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