Comments on: Infant Memory Works From Very Early

By: theo

theo — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:31:42 +0000

yeah good article but just have to say that there is different memory and infants do have memory before they hit 2 years old its just doesnt convert into long term memory. You should of wrote about that, saying that infants have memory is to general.

By: stephen

stephen — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:20:01 +0000

walked by a young lady looking into her eyes I had a weird urge to ask her if she was born on my birthdate and at the hospital I was born to our surprise she was born on my birthdate and at the same hospital

By: tiffani szilage

tiffani szilage — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 02:22:45 +0000

my earliest memory is: I cry. It's early/ late. My mom picks me up and carries my downstairs to the rocking chair and sings "lullaby.." After birth, this was my first home.

By: kat

kat — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 15:28:39 +0000

I lost lower skill memories when I was an adult due to PTSD. What I discovered was that we can’t function at a very high level without unconscious habitual memories. After my memory loss, I retained all the knowledge (factual memories) to brush my teeth, but nothing was trigging the action. I could type 70 wpm, but I could not turn around without getting lost. I began learning at an infant stage and seemed to have developed at a normal level all over again.

By: Katie

Katie — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:49:00 +0000

All the way through adolescence, I had a fuzzy but real memory of what my parents confirmed was my first birthday party: a pink cake, white tablecloth, glasses raised around a round table, my grandfather wearing something like a dinner jacket and making a toast, in a private room with two large windows with lace curtains. (No photographs were taken of the event.) What's strange is that now, at 23 years old, I can no longer recall the actual memory--the feeling of being back in that moment, re-experiencing it--like I could at 5, 9, even 13 years of age. I can now only remember those childhood memories of the event, and not the event itself. So instead of a memory of my first birthday party, i am left with a hollow composite visual "video" in my head of what I remembered in adolescence, which I feel detached from--i.e, outside of the experience.
Whenever I now try to recall this memory of the memory, I find that involuntarily, I keep retroactively "sharpening" the picture, assigning artificial details, like the color of the carpeting, to the scene in my mind. So I try not to think about it or actively recall it, as though leaving it untouched might preserve whatever is left of the integrity of the original memory.

By: Hiedi

Hiedi — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:28:00 +0000

As delusional as it seems, I definitely believe this. My earliest memory is from a time when I was not quite 1 years old. I remember that I had a babysitter who was young with long, straight brown hair. I also remember the apartment complex and the old man and his dog (poodle) that lived next door. I asked my father about whether all of these memories where true. He was pretty shocked, but confirmed that before I was one we had a babysitter with long straight brown hair and we lived in a certain apartment complex with an old man next door with a little poodle. I was less than one years old.

I don't think I imagined these memories.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:28:00 +0000

I find these studies with infants ingenious.

@Delusional: though you state that you disagree, what you wrote there doesn't quarrel with the result that they baby can remember. You might want to argue that they aren't conscious of it, but that does not at all mean that they don't have a memory of it.

By: Ashley

Ashley — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:22:00 +0000

Have the study considered the variable of presenting the infant with a different mobile and accessing the reactional value as oppose to just the one mobile? Ashley

By: Jeremy (PsyBlog author)

Jeremy (PsyBlog author) — Tue, 27 May 2008 09:22:00 +0000

Delusional, irrespective of whether your theory is correct the study still shows that the infant can remember the mobile - which is the main aim of the experiment.

By: Delusional

Delusional — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:53:00 +0000

completely disagree. I think all that is happening is that the baby's brain thinks that the mobile in question is actually part of their body. This is not as silly as it sounds, because lets face it, our brains don't actually know where the body ends and the real world begins. The brain is just an organ trapped in a hard dark enclosure with data lines for input and output. The experiment is not a successful validation of long term "memory" but rather just a creature, like any other, learning what each button and level of it's body does. For a little while you managed to convince the poor blighter that part of it's body was a bright shiny mobile.