Our inability to remember life during infancy is a psychological enigma because even very young infants are capable of remembering things . By the age of 3 months , infants can recognize a mobile they saw one to two weeks earlier . By 2 years , children can reproduce the order in which a series of objects was presented to them several months earlier . Yet most adults cannot remember things from before 3 to 4 years of age .
Sigmund Freud argued that we repress early memories , presumably because they are painful . Although we do not have access to them , he maintained , they are still present in the brain and can thus affect our psychological well-being . Cognitive psychologists , in contrast , argue that early memories are simply not stored in any format that we can access . This may be primarily because we lack language during infancy , so memories must be recorded nonverbally . Finally , neuroscientists note that the hippocampus , an area of brain involved in forming memories , matures fairly early in life . Thus , they believe early memories must be shipped off to the neocortex-an area involved in higher-level cognitive processes-for long-term storage . Because the neocortex is relatively immature until the toddler or preschool period , it stands to reason that young children would have relatively poor long-term memories . All of these explanations apply only to facts and events that can be consciously recalled . Little is known about memories acquired unconsciously , such as learning how to toss a ball . These memories seem to remain intact later in life , although how they are retrieved is a mystery.
By Charles Nelson ,
At the University of Minnesota
A neuroscientist and child psychologist .
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