At what age does a child start to remember events in thier life?

Question

how old were you in your earliest memory?

Answer 1

some can remember even before actual birth. Most around a year.

Answer 2

Hi there

Research shows that we start forming memories in the last few weeks before we are born.

HOWEVER

Two things play a critical role in deciding what we can remember later on.

Firstly, before the age at which we begin to understand language (which varies from person to person) we can only remember in "sensory format". Like Robin says she remembers pictures but she isn't sure if they are genuine memories. In fact the way she descibes the difference between them and her more coherent memories suggests they quite possibly are real memories.

Because we don't remember these early events in words, psychologists thought, until quite recently, that we couldn't even form memories during the very early part of our lives.
Experiments which strongly suggest that babies can recognise music heard while they were still inside their mother kinda blew that out of the water.

The other factor is that once the neuroblasts in our heads have all changed into neurons, and we have developed a nice collection of connections, for reasons no one understands (as yet?) the brain goes through a "self pruning" stage when many connections simply die off. Obviously memories that depended on neural pathways which subsequently die off cannot then be recalled - if they exist at all.

Given that this pruning process happens again around age 10, by the time we enter our teens we're going through a third brain growing process. And quite a lot of what we once stored, but which we seldom if ever recalled, has been lost.

So "your earliest memory" might be more accurately described as "the earliest memory you can recall."

Answer 3

My earliest memories are from about three years old. I occasionally get "pictures" of things from before then, but it's hard to know if they are actual memories or if I'm thinking of something I heard a story about.

Answer 4

I once read an article on fetal memory. A man by the last name of Hepper wrote it about studies that he had done, as well as studies by others, using music, vibrations and other tones, on fetus' in different weeks of development. After birth, the babies and their reactions to the differen stimuli was studied, with interesting results. Maybe there is a difference between memory development before birth and after birth. Humm, that's an interesting thought! Good luck!

Answer 5

Children develop recall skills at 3-4 years, meaning they can remember past events increasingly accurately and relate them. Actually remembering childhood events as an adult varies from person to person, I see snapshots of things from when I was 1year old (rabbit cage, a horn on my living room wall which have been verified by my mum) but can only remember actual events from 4years old.

Answer 6

my earliest memory was probably at 10 or 11 months old. after that it had to be when i was about 3... just starting pre-k.

Answer 7

Every child's memory capacity is different.

Mainly, any event carrying lots of emotion, such as a family member dying, a trip with your parents to a never seen place, going to school for the first time, or getting your first crush.

In general humans remember events in our lives if those events were emotional ones.

Answer 8

ever since there born...every little event adds up so they can walk and talk and develop. I have flashes of when i was in a cot and others of feeling like im crawling but they may have been dreams i had when i was a little older than that. my first full memory is when i changed shoes with this other little girl at a kindergarden she had pink sandles i had white shoes with with valco strips that had grass stuck in it.

I think that all our memorys of every event are all in our heads it often takes somthing to triger them....but if you concentrate on that memory you can branch of from it and remember other things...somtimes if you concentrait hard you can remember whole chapters of your life from start to finish...i usually end up all confused at the end and tired.

Answer 9

Most kids start to remember stuff about there life when they are arond 3 1/2 but some kids remember to 2 years old.

Answer 10

I would have to say I can remember a couple of things when I was about 3 yrs old.