1. Why don’t we remember our infancy?
Childhood Amnesia
Why don’t we remember our infancy?

2. We cannot remember taking our first steps
Remembered events in childhood are often false memories
These memories are usually reconstructions
Photographs
Family stories
Imagination

3. We do retain some early memories
Procedural memories such as how to walk
Semantic memories such as names of people and places

4. Brain is not well developed (biological explanation)
Brain areas involved in the storage of events
Areas of working memory and decision making such as prefrontal cortex

5. Self is missing and encoding not developed (cognitive explanation)
Lack of sense of self—self-concept does not emerge before two years of age
Impoverished encoding—preschoolers do not encode experiences as elaborately as adults and tend to rely on adults for retrieval clues.
The dependency on adults prevents preschoolers from building up a core of remembered material.
Preschoolers tend to focus on the routine rather than distinctive experiences that provide retrieval cues and make an event memorable
Preschoolers use different cognitive schemas so when these children switch to adult ways of thinking, they lack cues necessary to recall earlier experiences