Content uploaded by Damian Scarf
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Damian Scarf on Jul 15, 2019
Content may be subject to copyright.
Provided for non-commercial research and educational use only.
Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use.
This article was originally published in the International Encyclopedia of the Social
& Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy
is provided by Elsevier for the author’s benefit and for the benefit of the
author’s institution, for non-commercial research and educational use including
without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific
colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your institution’s administrator.
All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including
without limitation commercial reprints, selling or
licensing copies or access, or posting on open
internet sites, your personal or institution’s website or
repository, are prohibited. For exceptions, permission
may be sought for such use through Elsevier’s
permissions site at:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial
From Hayne, H., Imuta, K., Scarf, D., 2015. Memory Development During Infancy and Early
Childhood across Cultures. In: James D. Wright (editor-in-chief), International
Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol 15. Oxford:
Elsevier, pp. 147–154.
ISBN: 9780080970868
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.
Elsevier
Author's personal copy
Memory Development During Infancy and Early Childhood
across Cultures
Harlene Hayne, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Kana Imuta, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia
Damian Scarf, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Ó2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
Our autobiography is composed of memories from our past and plans for our future. Most adults’earliest autobiographical
memories date from between 3 and 4 years of age and the absence of memories from before this age is referred to as infantile
or childhood amnesia. This article traces memory development from the emergence of memory during infancy to the
emergence of autobiographical memory in early childhood.
This is the use of memory:
For liberation –not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.
T. S. Eliot (1943)
As T.S. Eliot (1943) notes, memory liberates us from being
bound solely to the past, present, or future; it allows us to
travel between these epochs in time and, in doing so, allows
us to construct our autobiography. An autobiography is
composed of not only memories from the past but also
thoughts of the present and plans for the future. To adults,
these aspects of memory are second nature but, when
thinking about our personal past, just how far back can we
go? And, if we can only go so far back, does that mean that
at some point in our lives we did not have memory?The
answer to the first question is clear; most adults’earliest
autobiographical memories date from between 3 and
4 years of age (e.g., Davis et al., 2008;Jack and Hayne,
2007, 2010;Jack et al., 2012;Sheingold and Tenney, 1982).
The almost universal absence of autobiographical memories
from before this age is referred to as infantile or childhood
amnesia (Freud, 1963). With respect to the second question,
the answer is also clear. Although our early past cannot
be recalled as adults, even very young infants are able
to encode, store, and retrieve memories after significant
delays (e.g., Barr et al., 1996;Hartshorn et al., 1998;Hayne
et al., 2000,1986). Having no autobiographical memories
fromatimewhenweoncehadmemory may seem
somewhat paradoxical; it simply reflects the complex
nature of memory development. This article traces memory
development from the emergence of explicit memory during
infancy to the emergence of autobiographical memory in
childhood.
What Is Memory?
There is general consensus that there is more than one type of
memory (cf Roediger, 1984;Snodgrass, 1989). Typically,
a distinction is made between explicit and implicit memory
(Graf and Schacter, 1985), also referred to as declarative
and nondeclarative memory (Squire, 1992). Essentially,
theorists draw a distinction between memories that people
are consciously aware of (i.e., declarative or explicit) and
those that they are not (i.e., nondeclarative or implicit)
(Hereafter we will use the terms implicit and explicit,
as these are the terms most commonly used in the
developmental literature (Hayne, 2004;Rovee-Collier et al.,
2000).) This distinction was largely born out of
experiments with people who became amnesic as a result of
the removal of, or damage to, the medial temporal lobe
(Scoville and Milner, 1957). These patients displayed
profound amnesia for recent events and, highlighting the
pivotal role of the hippocampus in memory, the degree of
impairment was positively related to “.the extent of
destruction to the hippocampal complex”(Scoville and
Milner, 1957: p. 20). Critically, follow-up experiments with
one patient established that he still displayed memory for
simple perceptual and motor tasks (Corkin, 1968, 1984,
2002;Milner et al., 1968). The patient learned these tasks
over several laboratory visits, suggesting that the learning
from one visit carried over to the next, despite the fact that
he could not recall his previous visit to the laboratory or
the task that he performed. This clear memory dissociation
was explained by appealing to a dual memory system, with
the medial temporal lobe being critical for explicit memory,
such as memory for daily life events, while implicit
memory is supported by brain regions outside the medial
temporal lobe (Cohen and Squire, 1980;Tulving and
Schacter, 1990).
Schacter and Moscovitch (1984) were the first to apply
this dual memory view to memory development, arguing
that the implicit memory system is functional at birth and
that the explicit memory system becomes functional between
8 and 10 months of age. Some authors have supported
this view (Carver and Bauer, 2001;Richmond and Nelson,
2007), whereas others have argued that the implicit and
explicit memory systems develop simultaneously rather than
sequentially (Rovee-Collier et al., 2000), that the explicit
memory system is preceded by a preexplicit system (Nelson,
1995), or that a dual memory system is not needed at all
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 15 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.23062-6 147
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 147–154
Author's personal copy
to explain infant memory development (Rovee-Collier and
Cuevas, 2009). While these authors disagree on exactly
when during development the explicit memory system is
functional, there is clear agreement that it is functional by
12 months of age.
Assessing Explicit Memory across Development
One obvious question is how can explicit memory be tracked
across development? Young children’s limited language skills
mean that one cannot simply ask them to tell what they
remember. Over the past several decades, developmental
psychologists have come up with some ingenious tasks that
allow young children to nonverbally convey their explicit
memory skill. These tasks include both deferred (Meltzoff,
1995) and elicited (Bauer and Mandler, 1989) imitation
paradigms, and conditioning tasks, such as the mobile
conjugate (Rovee and Rovee, 1969) and train (Hartshorn and
Rovee-Collier, 1997) reinforcement paradigms. While each of
these paradigms has made a significant contribution to the
study of memory development (see Hayne, 2004;Rovee-
Collier, 1997; for reviews), they do require procedural
changes when assessing memory in participants of different
ages. For example, the complexity and number of actions in
imitation tasks must be altered to equate for task difficulty
across ages. Similarly, while the mobile conjugate paradigm
is appropriate for use with infants up to 7 months of age,
it must be substituted with the train paradigm to assess
memory in older infants and young children.
Among developmental memory paradigms, the visual
paired comparison (VPC, Berlyne, 1958;Fantz, 1956)
paradigm is unique in that the exact same stimuli and
procedure can be used with infants, children, and adults.
In the VPC paradigm, participants are familiarized with
a visual stimulus, and after a delay, they are presented with
a pair of visual stimuli –the stimulus they viewed during
familiarization and a novel stimulus (Figure 1). Memory is
inferred if participants spend a greater proportion of time
looking at the novel, relative to the familiar, stimulus. This
preference for the novel stimulus is thought to be the result
of participants recognizing the familiar stimulus and,
consequently, directing more attention to processing the
novel one. This interpretation is based on Sokolov’s (1963)
comparator model, which holds that participants attempt to
match each stimulus they encounter to a stored
representation. If a match is found, attention to that stimulus
is inhibited, whereas if no match or a partial match is found,
then attention is maintained. Despite the relative simplicity
of the task, there is a growing body of neurophysiological
and developmental work supporting the view that the VPC
paradigm provides a measure of explicit memory. For
example, patients with damage to the hippocampus show
substantial deficits on the VPC paradigm when tested after
a delay (McKee and Squire, 1993;Munoz et al., 2011;
Pascalis et al., 2004). Furthermore, using Tulving’s (1983)
principle of experimental dissociation, researches have shown
that the same variables that influence adults’performance on
a wide range of explicit memory tasks also influence infants’
performance on the VPC paradigm.
Explicit Memory Development
Although the VPC paradigm has historically been used with
very young infants (Fantz, 1956), the authors have recently
used it to trace the development of explicit memory during
infancy and early childhood. All their work with the VPC
paradigm was carried out using an apparatus that consists of
a three-sided enclosure, covered in black felt, with two
21-inch monitors mounted to the back panel of the
enclosure. The monitors are positioned 46 cm apart and
a low-light video camera, also mounted to the back panel of
the enclosure, is positioned between them to allow for off-
line coding of infants’looking. In all the studies described
here, specially designed stimuli, consisting of computer-
generated three-dimensional cartoon faces –a blue mail-box
shaped face, a yellow circular face, and a red square –were
used (see Figure 1). During presentation, the faces either
blinked their eyes or moved their mouth. Although some
researchers have argued that the VPC paradigm may not be
suitable for young children (Atkinson, 2000), the authors’
use of animated stimuli has all but eliminated participant
attrition due to a lack of interest. Over the past few years, this
task has been used to study age-related changes in encoding,
retention, and retrieval.
Encoding
Prior research has shown that the speed with which infants
encode information increases considerably over the first
6 months of life (Davis and Rovee-Collier, 1983;Greco et al.,
1986;Hill et al., 1988). Using the VPC paradigm, Morgan
and Hayne (2006b) traced age-related changes in encoding
time from infancy through early childhood. In their study,
separate groups of 1- to 4-year-old children received either
a 5- or 10-s familiarized period and were then tested either
immediately or after a 24-h or 1-week delay. Note that the
immediate test provides a pure measure of encoding. When
the familiarization period was just 5 s, 1-year-old children
did not display a novelty preference even when they were
tested immediately after familiarization. This finding suggests
that, for 1-year-olds, the 5-s familiarization was simply not
sufficient for them to encode the stimulus. The 4-year-old
children, on the other hand, exhibited a novelty preference
when tested immediately and after the 24-h delay. When the
familiarization period was 10 s, both the 1- and 4-year-old
children exhibited retention when tested immediately, but
only the 4-year-old children exhibited retention after the
24-h and 1-week delays.
The fact that the 1-year-old children displayed a significant
novelty preference only when the familiarization period was
10 s, and that the novelty preference was only observed when
they were tested immediately, suggests that 10 s may be the
minimum amount of time 1-year-old children require to
encode a stimulus on the VPC paradigm. By 4 years of
age, however, a 5-s familiarization period is sufficient for
encoding. The additional finding that 4-year-old children’s
retention increased when the familiarization time was
increased from 5 to 10 s suggests that encoding is not an all-
or-none phenomenon, a point that is touched on when
discussing long-term retention.
148 Memory Development During Infancy and Early Childhood across Cultures
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 147–154
Author's personal copy
Long-Term Retention
The duration over which infants and young children can recall
information increases steadily over the first 18 months of life
(Greco et al., 1986;Hartshorn et al., 1998;Hill et al., 1988;
Vander Linde et al., 1985). Using the VPC paradigm, Morgan
and Hayne (2011) investigated whether this trend continues
through to early childhood. In Experiment 1 of their study,
1-, 2-, and 3-year-old children were familiarized with one of
the three cartoon faces for 10 s and were then tested either
immediately or after a 24-h or 1-week delay. Consistent with
Morgan and Hayne (2006b), 1-year-old children displayed
a novelty preference when tested immediately, but not after
the 24-h or 1-week delays. In contrast, 2-year-old children
exhibited retention when tested immediately and after the
24-h delay, but not when tested after the 1-week delay;
3-year-old children exhibited retention across all delays. To
test the limits of 3-year-old children’s retention, a separate
group was tested after a 1-month delay. After the 1-month
delay, 3-year-olds did not display a novelty preference,
suggesting that the limits of their retention on the VPC
paradigm falls somewhere between 1 and 4 weeks. In
Experiment 2 of their study, 4-year-old children were tested
after the same delays as the 1-, 2-, and 3-year-old children, as
well as after an additional 6-month delay. The 4-year-old
children exhibited retention after all delays, including the
6-month delay. This sharp increase in retention between
3 and 4 years of age suggests that the linear increase in
retention observed by Hartshorn et al. (1998) may not apply
across all stages of development (Figure 2). Interestingly, the
sharp increase in retention documented by Morgan and
Hayne (2011) corresponds to the age at which many adults
recall their first autobiographical memory.
Memory Retrieval
A large body of work has now shown that even once a memory
has been forgotten, it can sometimes be restored by the presen-
tation of a reminder (Campbell and Jaynes, 1966;Hartshorn and
Rovee-Collier, 1997;Rovee-Collier et al., 1980;Spear and
Parsons, 1976). For example, in the seminal demonstration of
reminding in infants, Rovee-Collier et al. (1980) trained
Figure 1 An example of an experimental trial. Top panel: familiarization phase in which identical stimuli are displayed on both screens. Middle
panel: Trial 1 of the test phase, with a novel stimulus presented on one screen and the familiar stimulus presented on the other screen. Bottom
panel: trial 2 of the test phase in which the right and left positions of the test stimuli are switched. The animated stimuli are provided in the multi-
media annexes.
Memory Development During Infancy and Early Childhood across Cultures 149
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 147–154
Author's personal copy
3-month-old infants in the mobile conjugate reinforcement
paradigm and tested them after a 13- or 27-day delay –
retention intervals after which 3-month-olds typically fail to
exhibit retention. Twenty-four hours prior to testing, infants
were presented with a reminder consisting of a 3-min exposure
to the training mobile. Importantly, during the reminder, the
mobile was controlled by the experimenter rather than the
infant, precluding the opportunity for any retraining during
the reminder treatment. During the retention test, the infants
in both the 13- and 27-day delay conditions exhibited
excellent retention; in fact, their performance was virtually
identical to that seen immediately following the conclusion of
training 2–4 weeks earlier, clearly demonstrating that forgotten
memories can be retrieved and expressed under the
appropriate circumstances.
Extending the work previously conducted with young
infants, Morgan and Hayne (2006a) assessed the effectiveness
of a reminder treatment on retention by 1- and 2-year-old
children using the VPC paradigm. In their initial experiments,
children were assigned to a reminder group or one of three
control groups: forgetting control, encoding control, or
reminder control. Children in the reminder group received
a 10-s familiarization period followed by a 1-week delay,
a delay after which children in both age groups typically fail
to show a novelty preference (Morgan and Hayne, 2006b,
2011). After the delay, children in the reminder condition
received a brief reminder, consisting of a 1-s presentation of
the familiarized stimulus, immediately followed by the test.
Children in the forgetting control group received the same
familiarization and test as children in the reminder
condition, but did not receive the reminder treatment prior
to testing. Children in the encoding control condition were
tested immediately after familiarization (i.e., they did not
experience a delay) and children in the reminder control
condition received only the reminder treatment and test (i.e.,
they did not experience the initial 10-s familiarization period).
Consistent with prior research, 10 s was sufficient for 1- and
2-year-olds to encode the target stimulus, that is, children in
the encoding control condition exhibited retention when they
were tested immediately after familiarization. Also consistent
with prior research, following a 10-s familiarization period, 1-
and 2-year-old children exhibited forgetting after a 1-week
delay, that is, children in the forgetting control condition did
not exhibit a novelty preference during the test. In addition,
exposure to the reminder alone, in the absence of prior
familiarization yielded no evidence of memory during the
test, that is, children in the reminder control condition did
not display a novelty preference. With respect to the
reminder condition, 2-year-old children exhibited
a significant novelty preference after the 1-week delay,
demonstrating that the brief reminder was sufficient to
reactivate the forgotten memory. Although 1-year-old
children did not exhibit retention under these familiarization
and reminding conditions, they did exhibit retention if the
duration of the original familiarization period or the
duration of the reminder was increased.
Prior research has shown that while younger infants require
the re-presentation of the original experimental stimuli or the
original context in order for memory retrieval to be initiated
(e.g., Morgan and Hayne, 2006a;Rovee-Collier et al., 1980),
older children can exploit retrieval cues that are different
from those they originally encountered (e.g., Hayne et al.,
2000;Herbert and Hayne, 2000). This increased flexibility in
memory retrieval allows older children (and adults) to access
and use their memories under conditions that are different
from those under which the memory was originally encoded.
In addition to physical reminders such as objects and
contexts that were part of the original event, verbal reminders
are also powerful retrieval cues. When during development
can children begin to exploit verbal retrieval cues to
reactivate their forgotten memories? In the first study
designed to address this question, Morgan and Hayne (2007)
assessed the effect of verbal reminders on memory
reactivation in young children. In their study, separate groups
of 4-year-old children received a 5-s familiarization period in
the VPC paradigm followed by a 2-week delay. Utilizing the
method developed by Morgan and Hayne (2006a), children
in the nonverbal reminder group were reexposed to the
Figure 2 The performance of 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children on the VPC paradigm as a function of delay.
150 Memory Development During Infancy and Early Childhood across Cultures
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 147–154
Author's personal copy
familiarization stimulus for 1 s prior to testing. Children in the
verbal reminder group received the same familiarization time
and were tested after the same delay, but before entering the
experimental room, they were provided with the following
reminder: “Can you remember coming here two weeks ago?”
followed by “Can you remember what face you saw last time you
came?”Consistent with the previous study, forgetting,
encoding, and reminder control conditions were also included.
Children in both the nonverbal and verbal reminder condi-
tions displayed a significant novelty preference during the test.
In addition, there was no difference in the degree of novelty
preference displayed by the nonverbal and verbal reminder
groups suggesting that at least at 4 years of age, verbal and
nonverbal reminders are equally effective in reactivating the
forgotten memory. To investigate whether there were age-related
changes in children’s ability to utilize verbal reminders, Imuta
et al. (2013) tested 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children using
a paradigm comparable to that used by Morgan and Hayne
(2007).ReplicatingMorgan and Hayne’s (2007) finding,
4-year-old children displayed a significant novelty preference
following the presentation of the verbal reminder.
Furthermore, both the 2- and 3-year-old children displayed
a significant novelty preference following the presentation of
the verbal reminder (Imuta et al., 2013). This finding suggests
that by at least 2 years of age, children can use another
person’s verbal cue to reactivate a forgotten memory.
The research reviewed thus far demonstrates that recogni-
tion memory continues to develop throughout early child-
hood. Although recognition memory is a critical component of
the explicit memory system, it is just one form of explicit
memory subserved by the hippocampus. Indeed, recent
neurophysiological evidence suggests that the emergence and
development of recognition memory, like other hippocampus-
dependent memory processes, depends on the maturation of
specific circuits within the hippocampus (Brun et al., 2002;
Lavenex and Lavenex, 2013). The maturation of each
individual circuit, and the emergence of their respective
memory processes, culminates in the emergence of episodic
memory (Brun et al., 2002;Lavenex and Lavenex, 2013).
With respect to infantile amnesia, this developmental
sequence is important because it demonstrates that the
explicit memory system can be functional during early
childhood, yet still be unable to support the formation and
long-term retention of episodic memories. Because episodic
memory is the type of memory on which our autobiography
is built, the next section reviews its emergence and
development during early childhood.
The Emergence of Episodic Memory
The term episodic memory was coined by Tulving (1972) and
was originally defined solely in terms of the spatial (i.e., where)
and temporal (i.e., when) components of an event (i.e., what).
In order to capture the autobiographical nature of episodic
memory, Tulving (1985) added the notion of autonoetic
consciousness, a consciousness that endows one with the
knowledge that what one remembers is a personal past
episode rather than something one simply has information
about (i.e., noetic knowledge). Obviously, defining episodic
memory by the conscious experience of remembering, rather
than the content (i.e., what, where, and when), presents
a challenge for testing the construct in young children, whose
verbal skills are still limited. To overcome this verbal
obstacle, Tulving (2005) devised the ‘spoon test.’The spoon
test derives from an Estonian children’s story, in which
a little girl dreams about attending a friend’s birthday party.
Guests at the party are served the girl’s favorite dessert;
unbeknownst to the little girl, however, guests were required
to bring their own spoon. Because she does not have
a spoon, the little girl must stand by and watch as others
enjoy the dessert. The next night, before going to bed, the girl
tucks a spoon underneath her pillow, just in case she returns
to the party in her dreams. According to Tulving (2005),
placing the spoon underneath her pillow provides nonverbal
evidence of the girl’s autonoetic consciousness.
To investigate the emergence of episodic memory, Scarf
et al. (2013) tested 3- and 4-year-old children on a novel
spoon test. Children participated in two sessions separated
by a delay. In Session 1, children were taken out to
a sandbox and were told, “I saw a pirate around here earlier
today and I think that he might have hidden his treasure in
our sandbox. Can you help me find it?”The experimenter
and the child then dug up a treasure chest only to find that it
was locked. The experimenter then asked the child if he or
she had a key and, when the child said no, the experimenter
suggested that they go back inside. Twenty-four hours later,
the child returned to the laboratory and was told that they
were going to go back out to the sandbox but, before they
went outside, they were allowed to choose one of three
objects: a brightly colored ball, a key, and a brightly colored
wind-up toy. The critical measure was whether children
would correctly pick the key to take with them.
Of the 4-year-old children, 75% selected the key,
a proportion significantly above chance (1 in 3, 33%).
In contrast, the 3-year-old children performed at chance, with
only 33% selecting the key. There are two possible reasons
why the 3-year-old children failed to select the key. One
possibility is that the single trial did not provide the 3-year-
old children with enough time to encode the sandbox
episode. A second possibility is that the 3-year-old children
adequately encoded the sandbox episode, but that they failed
to retain the memory across the delay. To determine the
source of their difficulty, Scarf et al. (2013) tested separate
groups of 3-year-old children either immediately after the
sandbox episode or after a 15- or 30-min delay. Consistent
with the view that 3-year-old children were able to encode
the sandbox episode, when tested immediately, a significant
number of 3-year-old children selected the key. Across the
no-delay, 15-min delay, and 30-min delay conditions, there
was a linear decrease in the proportion of children selecting
the key such that at the 30-min delay, performance was at
chance. This finding suggests that the source of difficulty for
3-year-old children on the spoon test is retaining the
memory across significant delays. To test the limits of 4-year-
old children’s retention, a separate group was tested after
a 1-week delay. Remarkably, 100% of the 4-year-old children
selected the key after 1 week (Figure 3).
The fact that episodic memory emerges by 3 years of age,
and that the long-term retention of explicit and episodic
Memory Development During Infancy and Early Childhood across Cultures 151
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 147–154
Author's personal copy
memories develops considerably between 3 and 4 years of age,
accords well with the average age of most adult’s earliest
memories. It is important to note, however, that although
the seeds of episodic memory are clearly sown between 3
and 4 years of age, there are also significant individual
differences in adult’s earliest memories, suggesting that just
the emergence of episodic memory per se does not explain
the phenomenon of childhood amnesia entirely. The most
consistent individual differences in the age of adults’earliest
memories have been documented in cross-cultural studies
and they provide, perhaps, the best evidence that the
conversations that children have with adults are a causal
factor in the development of autobiographical memory
(Fivush et al., 1995;Nelson, 1990, 1993;Pillemer and White,
1989). New Zealand has the unique privilege of being home
to the culture with the earliest memories of any culture
studied thus far (Hayne and MacDonald, 2003;MacDonald
et al., 2000). M
aori are the native population of New
Zealand and, on average, their first memories date from
a few months before their third birthday. In contrast, New
Zealand European’s earliest memories, consistent with other
European populations (Mullen, 1994;Mullen and Yi, 1995;
Wang, 2001, 2006a,b), date from approximately 3
1
/
2
years
of age (Hayne and MacDonald, 2003;MacDonald et al.,
2000). The final section of this article explores how M
aori
cultural practices help adults encode and hold onto their
earliest childhood memories.
Ng
aP
umahara o Ng
a Tamarikitanga
The title of this section, Ng
aP
umahara o Ng
a Tamarikitanga,is
M
aori for Recollections of One’sChildhood. As noted above,
M
aori have the earliest memories of any culture studied to
date, and this is a product of both how M
aori parents recollect
memories with their young children and also the types of
memories they choose to recollect. Initial work comparing the
way in which M
aori and European New Zealand mothers talk
to their children yielded the somewhat surprising finding that
M
aori mothers were less elaborative, when compared to New
Zealand European mothers, when recollecting memories from
the past (Hayne and MacDonald, 2003). Given the fact that
M
aori adults have significantly earlier memories than New
Zealand European adults, this finding was inconsistent with
work demonstrating that children of highly elaborative
mothers generally have earlier first memories (Jack et al.,
2009). From a cultural perspective, this finding was also
surprising given that the M
aori culture is renowned for its
strong oral traditions and that their whakapapa,theoral
transmission of family ancestry, is viewed as one of the
richest in the world (Biggs, 1970).
One potential explanation for Hayne and MacDonald’s
(2003) finding is that the types of past events the parents
were asked to talk about in the course of the research –
recent events both the mother and child engaged in –were
not representative of the types of events M
aori parents
generally talk about with their children. To investigate this
possibility, Reese et al. (2008) compared M
aori and New
Zealand European mothers’elaborative style when they
talked to their child about the child’s birth and about
a recent past event. Consistent with Hayne and MacDonald
(2003), when discussing recent past events, New Zealand
European mothers were more elaborative than M
aori
mothers. In contrast, when talking about the child’s birth,
M
aori mothers were more elaborative, although only
marginally so. Given that M
aori and New Zealand European
mothers are comparable in their general level of elaboration,
another influence on M
aori children’s autobiographical
memory development may be the content of their mother’s
elaborations. With respect to content, Reese et al. (2008)
found that M
aori and New Zealand European mothers talked
with equal frequency about the people, places, and specific
times of events, but that M
aori mothers made more
references to relative time and to internal states. Reference to
Figure 3 The performance of 3- and 4-year-old children on the spoon test as a function of delay.
152 Memory Development During Infancy and Early Childhood across Cultures
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 147–154
Author's personal copy
relative time and internal states may be especially important in
children’s autobiographical memory development. Young
children have a great deal of difficulty with concepts of time,
and the ability to organize episodic memories continues to
develop well into early adolescence (Chen et al., 2013;
Friedman, 2003). The use of relative time may help young
children learn the chronological nature of autobiographical
memory before they are able to master temporal concepts
and it may also foster the ability to appreciate the order of
events in individual episodic memories.
With respect to M
aori mothers’references to internal states,
outside of autobiographical memory development, there is
a large body of work demonstrating that parent talk about
mental states relates to young children’s language and
emotion understanding (e.g., Taumoepeau and Ruffman,
2006, 2008). Similarly, by referencing internal states, M
aori
mothers may contribute to children’s developing sense of self.
A sense of self is critical for both episodic and autobio-
graphical memory, because it endows children with autono-
etic awareness, allowing them to distinguish between
memories they personally experienced (i.e., autonoetic) and
those they did not (i.e., noetic). Although these accounts are
speculative, in the absence of significantly greater levels of
elaboration, the language used by M
aori mothers when rec-
ollecting with their children, provides another potential
explanation for M
aori adults early autobiographical
memories.
Summary
This article opened with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s(1943)
Little Gidding and it shall be ended on the same note. This
article builds on earlier reviews by Rovee-Collier (1997) and
Hayne (2004), providing an updated view on the current
status of memory research in developmental psychology.
Although empirical evidence for the principles of explicit
memory development, the emergence of episodic memory,
and the development of autobiographical memory has
built over the past decade, the basic theoretical views
have remained largely unchanged. With respect to the
phenomenon of childhood amnesia, recent empirical work
is providing us with a more fine-grained analysis of the
phenomenon and how early theories may be integrated to
provide a complete developmental account. In this context,
T.S. Eliot’s (1943) quote seems appropriate –the theories of
childhood amnesia may not change, but each new finding
makes the theories seem anew and in need of further
exploration.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot (1943)
See also: Autobiographical Memory During Early Childhood
and Cultural Variations; Autobiographical Memory; Childhood
Memories; Early Memory Development and Cultural
Variations; Episodic Memory; Hippocampal Amnesia; Memory
Binding.
Bibliography
Atkinson, J., 2000. The Developing Visual Brain. Oxford University Press, New York.
Barr, R., Dowden, A., Hayne, H., 1996. Developmental changes in deferred
imitation by 6-to 24-month-old infants. Infant Behavior and Development 19,
159–170.
Bauer, P.J., Mandler, J.M., 1989. One thing follows another: effects of temporal
structure on 1-to 2-year-olds’recall of events. Developmental Psychology 25,
197–206.
Berlyne, D.B., 1958. The influence of the albedo and complexity of stimuli on visual
fixation in the human infant. British Journal of Psychology 49, 315–318.
Biggs, B., 1970. The Maori People in the 1960’s: A Symposium. The Maori language
past and present. B. & J. Paul, Auckland, NZ, 65–84.
Brun, V.H., Otnæss, M.K., Molden, S., Steffenach, H.-A., Witter, M.P., Moser, M.-B.,
et al., 2002. Place cells and place recognition maintained by direct entorhinal-
hippocampa l circuitry. Science 296 , 2243–2246.
Campbell, B.A., Jaynes, J., 1966. Reinstatement. Psychological Review 73,
478–480.
Carver, L.J., Bauer, P.J., 2001. The dawning of a past: the emergence of long-term
explicit memory in infancy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 130,
726–745.
Chen, Y., McAnally, H.M., Reese, E., 2013. Development in the organization of
episodic memories in middle childhood and adolescence. Frontiers in Behavioral
Neuroscience 7, 1–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00084.
Cohen, N.J., Squire, L.R., 1980. Preserved learning and retention of pattern-
analyzing skill in amnesia: dissociation of knowing how and knowing that.
Science 210, 207–210.
Corkin, S., 1968. Acquisition of motor skill after bilateral medial temporal-lobe
excision. Neuropsychologia 6, 255–265.
Corkin, S., 1984. Lasting consequences of bilateral medial temporal lobectomy:
clinical course and experimental findings in HM. Paper presented at the Seminars
in Neurology.
Corkin, S., 2002. What’s new with the amnesic patient HM? Nature Reviews
Neuroscience 3, 153–160.
Davis, J.M., Rovee-Collier, C.K., 1983. Alleviated forgetting of a learned contingency
in 8-week-old infants. Developmental Psychology 19, 353–365.
Davis, N., Gro ss, J., Hayne, H., 2008. Defining the boundary of childhood amnesia.
Memory 16, 465–474.
Eliot, T.S., 1943. Little Gidding. Faber & Faber.
Fantz, R.L., 1956. A method for studying early visual development. Perceptual and
Motor Skills 6 , 13–15.
Fivush, R., Haden, C., Adam, S., 1995. Structure and coherence of preschoolers’
personal narratives over time: Implications for childhood amnesia. Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology 60, 32–56.
Freud, S., 1963. New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. In: Strachey, J. (Ed.),
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 15. Hogarth Press, London, England, pp. 199–201.
Friedman, W.J., 2003. The development of a differentiated sense of the past and the
future. Advances in Child Development and Behavior 31, 229–269.
Graf, P., Schacter, D.L., 1985. Implicit and explicit memory for new associations in
normal and amnesic subjects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition 11, 501.
Greco, C., Rovee-Collier, C., Hayne, H., Griesler, P., Earley, L., 1986. Ontogeny of
early event memory: I. Forgetting and retrieval by 2-and 3-month-olds. Infant
Behavior and Development 9, 441–460.
Hartshorn, K., Rovee-Collier, C., 1997. Infant learning and long-term memory at
6months:aconfirming analysis. Developmental Psychobiology 30, 71–85.
Hartshorn, K., Rovee-Collier, C., Gerhardstein, P., Bhatt, R.S., Wondoloski, T.L.,
Klein, P., et al., 1998. The ontogeny of long-term memory over the first year-
and-a-half of life. Developmental Psychobiology 32, 69–89.
Hayne, H., 2004. Infant memory development: Implications for childhood amnesia.
Developmental Review 24, 33–73.
Hayne, H., Boniface, J., Barr, R., 2000. The development of declarative memory in
human infants: age-related changes in deferred imitation. Behavioral
Neuroscience 114, 77.
Memory Development During Infancy and Early Childhood across Cultures 153
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 147–154
Author's personal copy
Hayne, H., Greco, C., Earley, L., Griesler, P., Rovee-Collier, C., 1986. Ontogeny of
early event memory: II. Encoding and retrieval by 2-and 3-month-olds. Infant
Behavior and Development 9, 461–472.
Hayne, H., MacDonald, S., 2003. The socialization of autobiographical memory in
children and adults: the roles of culture and gender. In: Fivush, R., Haden, C.D.
(Eds.), Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self:
Developmental and Cultural Perspectives. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 99–120.
Herbert, J., Hayne, H., 2000. Memory retrieval by 18–30-month-olds: age-related
changes in representational flexibility. Developmental Psychology 36, 473–484.
Hill, W., Borovsky, D., Rovee-Collier, C., 1988. Co ntinuities in infant memory
development over the first half-year. Developmental Psychobiology 21, 43–62.
Imuta, K., Scarf, D., Hayne, H., 2013. The effect of verbal reminders on memory
reactivation in 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children. Developmental Psychology 49,
1058–1065. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0029432.
Jack, F., Hayne, H., 2007. Eliciting adults’earliest memories: does it matter how we
ask the question? Memory 15, 647–663.
Jack, F., Hayne, H., 2010. Childhood amnesia: empirical evidence for a two-stage
phenomenon. Memory 18, 831–844.
Jack, F., MacDonald, S., Reese, E., Hayne, H., 2009. Maternal reminiscing style
during early childhood predicts the age of adolescents’earliest memories. Child
Development 80, 496–505.
Jack, F., Simcock, G., Hayne, H., 2012. Magic memories: young children’s verbal
recall after a 6-year delay. Child Development 83, 159–172.
Lavenex, P., Lavenex, P.B., 2013. Building hippocampal circuits to learn and
remember: insights into the development of human memory. Behavioural Brain
Research.
MacDonald, S., Uesiliana, K., Hayne, H., 2000. Cross-cultural and gender differ-
ences in childhood amnesia. Memory 8, 365–376.
McKee, R.D., Squire, L.R., 1993. On the development of declarative memory.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 19, 397.
Meltzoff, A.N., 1995. What infant memory tells us about infantile amnesia: long-term
recall and deferred imitation. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 59,
497–515.
Milner, B., Corkin, S., Teuber, H.-L., 1968. Further analysis of the hippocampal
amnesic syndrome: 14-year follow-up study of HM. Neuropsychologia 6,
215–234.
Morgan, K., Hayne, H., 2006a. Age-related changes in memory reactivation by 1-
and 2-year-old human infants. Developmental Psychobiology 48, 48–57.
Morgan, K., Hayne, H., 2006b. The effect of encoding time on retention by infants
and young children. Infant Behavior and Development 29, 599–602.
Morgan, K., Hayne, H., 2007. Nonspecific verbal cues alleviate forgetting by young
children. Developmental Science 10, 727–733.
Morgan, K., Hayne, H., 2011. Age-related changes in visual recognition memory
during infancy and early childhood. Developmental Psychobiology 53, 157–165.
Mullen, M.K., 1994. Earliest recollections of childhood: a demographic analysis.
Cognition 52, 55–79.
Mullen, M.K., Yi, S., 1995. The cultural context of talk about the past: Implications
for the development of autobiographical memory. Cognitive Development 10,
407–419.
Munoz, M., Chadwick, M., Perez-Hernandez, E., Vargha-Khadem, F., Mishkin, M.,
2011. Novelty preference in patients with developmental amnesia. Hippocampus
21, 1268–1276.
Nelson, C.A., 1995. The ontogeny of human memory: a cognitive neuroscience
perspective. Developmental Psychology 31, 723.
Nelson, K., 1990. Remembering, forgetting, and childhood amnesia. In: Fivush, R.,
Hudson, J.A. (Eds.), Knowing and Remembering in Young Children. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, pp. 301–316.
Nelson, K., 1993. The psychological and social origins of autobiographical memory.
Psychological Science 4, 7–14.
Pascalis,O.,Hunkin,N.,Holdstock,J.,Isaac,C.,Mayes,A.,2004.Visualpaired
comparison performance is impaired in a patient with selective hippocampal
lesions and relatively intact item recognition. Neuropsychologia 42, 1293–1300.
Pillemer, D.B., White, S.H., 1989. Childhood events recalled by children and adults.
Advances in Child Development and Behavior 21, 297–340.
Reese, E., Hayne, H., MacDonald, S., 2008. Looking back to the future: M
aori and
Pakeha mother–child birth stories. Child Development 79, 114–125.
Richmond, J., Nelson, C.A., 2007. Accounting for change in declarative memory:
a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Developmental Review 27, 349–373.
Roediger, H.L., 1984. Does current evidence from dissociation experiments favor the
episodic/semantic distinction? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7, 252–254.
Rovee, C.K., Rovee, D.T., 1969. Conjugate reinforcement of infant exploratory
behavior. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 8, 33–39.
Rovee-Collier, C., 1997. Dissociations in infant memory: rethinking the development
of implicit and explicit memory. Psychological Review 104, 467–498.
Rovee-Collier, C., Cuevas, K., 2009. Multiple memory systems are unnecessary to
account for infant memory development: an ecological model. Developmental
Psychology 45, 160–174.
Rovee-Collier, C., Hayne, H., Colombo, M., 2000. The Development of Implicit and
Explicit Memory, vol. 24. John Benjamins Publishing, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
Rovee-Collier, C.K., Sullivan, M., Enright, M., Lucas, D., Fagen, J., 1980. Reac-
tivation of infant memory. Science 208, 1159–1161.
Scarf, D., Gross, J., Colombo, M., Hayne, H., 2013. To have and to hold: episodic
memory in 3- and 4-year-old children. Developmental Psychobiology 55,
125–132.
Schacter, D.L., Moscovitch, M., 1984. Infants, amnesics, and dissociable memory
systems. In: Moscovitch, M. (Ed.), Advances in the Study of Communication and
Affect, vol. 9. Springer, pp. 173–216.
Scoville, W.B., Milner, B., 1957. Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal
lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, & Psychiatry 20, 11–21.
Sheingold, K., Tenney, Y.J., 1982. Memory for a Salient Childhood Event. In: Neisser, U.
(Ed.), Memory Observed. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 201–212.
Snodgrass, J.G., 1989. How many memory systems are there really?: some
evidence from the picture fragment completion task. In: Isawa, C. (Ed.), Current
Issues in Cognitive Processes: The Tulane Flowerree Symposium on Cognition.
Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 135–173.
Sokolov, E., 1963. Perception and the Conditioned Reflex. Pergamon Press,
Oxford.
Spear, N., Parsons, P., 1976. Analysis of a reactivation treatment: ontogenetic
determinants of alleviated forgetting. In: Medin, D.L., Roberts, W.A., Davis, R.T.
(Eds.), Processes of Animal Memory. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 135–165.
Squire, L.R., 1992. Declarative and nondeclarative memory: multiple brain systems
supporting learning and memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 4,
232–243.
Taumoepeau, M., Ruffman, T., 2006. Mother and infant talk about mental states
relates to desire language and emotion understanding. Child Development 77,
465–481.
Taumoepeau, M., Ruffman, T., 2008. Stepping stones to others’minds: maternal
talk relates to child mental state language and emotion understanding at 15, 24,
and 33 months. Child Development 79, 284–302.
Tulving, E., 1972. Episodic and semantic memory. In: Tulving, E., Donaldson, W.
(Eds.), Organization of Memory. Academic Press, New York, pp. 381–402.
Tulving, E., 1983. Elements of Episodic Memory. Oxford University Press, New York.
Tulving, E., 1985. Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie
Canadienne 26, 1.
Tulving, E., 2005. Episodic memory and autonoesis: uniquely human. In: Terrace, H.,
Metcalfe, J. (Eds.), The Missing Link in Cognition. Oxford University Press, New
York, pp. 4–56.
Tulving, E., Schacter, D.L., 1990. Priming and human memory systems. Science
247, 301–306.
Vander Linde, E., Morrongiello, B.A., Rovee-Collier, C., 1985. Determinants of
retention in 8-week-old infants. Developmental Psychology 21, 601–613.
Wang, Q., 2001. Culture effects on adults’earliest childhood recollection and self-
description: implications for the relation between memory and the self. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 81, 220–233.
Wang, Q., 2006a. Earliest recollections of self and others in European American and
Taiwanese young adults. Psychological Science 17, 708–714.
Wang, Q., 2006b. Relations of maternal style and child self-concept to autobio-
graphical memories in Chinese, Chinese immigrant, and European American
3-year-olds. Child Development 77, 1794–1809.
Relevant Websites
http://www.otago.ac.nz/psychology/staff/harlenehayne.html –University of Otago,
Department of Psychology.
http://www.otago.ac.nz/psychology/staff/otago025837.html –University of Otago,
Department of Psychology.
154 Memory Development During Infancy and Early Childhood across Cultures
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 147–154
Author's personal copy