When a child begins to remember his childhood. Why do we remember childhood so badly? What do we remember

Memory is the main factor in the development of the cognitive sphere of the child. Therefore, special attention should be paid to its development. As the child grows older, he remembers his grandmother's face, words and colors, the names of his friends in kindergarten, poems that parents read to him and much more.

When a child memorizes the alphabet, it becomes the first step to learning to read. As he gets older, he memorizes the multiplication table, new foreign words, names of capitals of the countries of the world, poems. He keeps in mind the tasks planned for the day, the messages that come to him during the day, the football training schedule and much more. And all this time he remembers the events that have already happened to him, both pleasant and unpleasant.

If you put together everything that a person remembers (information, practical skills and life events), it becomes clear what an important role memory plays in our lives. It is through memory that we are who we are.

The older the child gets, the more he can remember. Memory is an extremely useful thing, and it would be great if we could make it work more efficiently. But, according to psychologists, this is impossible, and all games and exercises for the development of memory in children do not give a tangible effect. Memory is not like a muscle, it cannot be developed through training. On the other hand, if you understand the mechanisms of memory development (what, when and why children remember), you can follow them and develop the child's memory in accordance with his abilities.

younger children

Most of us don't remember events before the age of two. Psychologists call this period “childhood amnesia”. They claim that we access and store memories through speech. Since children under two years of age have not developed speech, and they cannot fix their impressions, hugs and kisses of their parents, smells and tastes - all that happened to a child under two years old. All this is not remembered, although it has an impact on the future life of the child.

Scientists have proven that the ability to remember events appears in a child quite early. Studies have shown that six-month-old babies can be taught to make sounds with a rattle attached to a stroller and will remember it after a few days.

Preschool children remember best what interests them, scares them or delights them, and these memories last for about 10 months. Children do not remember the details of the last visit to the doctor, but they can remember their impressions of this visit: "The doctor told me something that I did not like."

Children tend to generalize even single events from the past: both good and bad. They think that if an event happened once, then it will repeat itself again and again. Scenarios that are remembered by the baby can be pleasant (“If you go to visit grandma, you can eat sweets”), unpleasant (“If the nanny comes, it means that mom will leave soon”) or cause stress (“When we go with our parents to visit , they leave me alone with these terrible children").

Provide your child with activities that encourage memory. Play games with your child before bed. Play along with your child as he puts his favorite teddy bear to bed. Children's poems captivate children so much that they suggest individual sounds and syllables, even if they still do not know how to pronounce words. Accompany the verses with movements - and the child will repeat them after you.

Practical Tips

The child should do as many activities as possible on their own. In this case, these actions are more likely to be stored in memory.
Remind your child of images in the form of pictures. For example, if he has not seen his grandmother for a long time, show him her photo.

2 to 7 years old

At this age, the development of memory is influenced not only by the ability to speak, but also by the ability to tell stories. Children better remember events that have a plot.

Preschoolers remember the most vivid details. For example, a child is more likely to say, “I remember my parents bought me a mask and snorkel for snorkeling. I went to the beach with them and met my cousin there" than "I remember going to the beach". Children remember events and create stories from them.

IN preschool age children are already able to memorize abstract concepts - colors, numbers from one to ten, the alphabet and others. This information is stored in short-term memory, and the child makes an effort to recall it if necessary. Over time, this process becomes automatic, and you no longer need to make efforts to memorize. The child no longer remembers the names of the flowers, he just knows them.

When a child often recalls abstract concepts, they become knowledge. So, for example, a child knows how to ride a bicycle. First, he remembers what needs to be done, and this takes all his attention. After a while, the information is reproduced automatically by the child, and he masters the skill of riding a bicycle.

The preschooler remembers what interests him (for example, he remembers his sister's doll, which he is not allowed to touch). Memorizing more complex concepts best method is repetition. When a child asks to read the same fairy tale to him again and again, he unconsciously remembers it. And if the text is easy to remember (it is rhyming, rhythmic or illustrated), the child will easily be able to remember it completely.

What helps in the development of memory

Repetition, although it helps to remember information, does not develop memorization skills. Scientists say that parents who teach children to tell stories correctly help them develop memory.

To help your child develop memory, tell him stories. Encourage him to speak interesting stories. Let him start with minor events: a walk in an amusement park or a day spent in kindergarten. Ask your child questions such as: “Were you given cookies for breakfast today?”.

Practical Tips

Remember the details of events. If a child says at breakfast that he has lost his favorite toy, help him remember when and where he last played with it when he discovered that the toy was lost. Check if the toy has fallen behind the sofa.
Come up with melodies and rhymes. Help your child remember the home phone number by writing a song about it. In the same way, you can teach your child to remember names, titles, and more.
A child can be taught safety rules in the same way as the alphabet or the names of colors. Incorporate the concepts you want to teach your baby into his daily activities. Recognize familiar letters on signs or product packaging in a supermarket. Remind your child to repeat the phone number at home.

From 5 years and older

At this age, children learn to read and do simple arithmetic calculations. This puts a lot of stress on memory. At the same time, children usually perform simple household chores. Faced with the need to cope with new tasks, memory develops. Changes in the brain make it easier for the baby to remember information.

All children remember different information in different ways. Like adults, they remember better what interests them; what they understand; as well as what they know a lot about. Psychologists say that six-year-old children demonstrate an amazing ability to remember information from their hobbies. They can accurately name their favorite football team scores, player details, and more.

Possessing the ability to memorize information from one area of knowledge, a child may not show it in any way in other areas. An experiment was conducted in which children and adults took part. During the experiment, it was necessary to memorize the positions of the chess pieces on the board. Children coped with this task better than adults. But when the same participants were asked to memorize a series of numbers, adults performed better. Children's abilities were manifested only in the field of chess.

But how do children remember information that is not part of their interests? When they forget something they need to remember, they make an effort to retrieve the information they need. Children over the age of 5 begin to understand that it takes effort to memorize information.

What helps develop memory

Although children aged 6-7 years show good memory abilities in a certain area, they cannot apply them in other areas. And kids who understand and can explain how they remember something are able to use this method in different areas. Therefore, if you help a child understand how he remembers information, you will help to realize his ability to memorize in different areas.

Get ready in advance. For example, teach your child to pack a bag for school in the evening so that they don’t forget anything in the morning.
Put things in the space provided for them. Explain to the child that if he collects toys after he has played with them, not a single toy will be lost. You should also put keys and other things in their place.
Visualize. If the child wants to receive several gifts for New Year, invite him to draw them so that he does not forget anything.
Prompt. Leave your child's shoes near the dog's bowl so the child won't forget to feed the dog before he goes out for a walk.

Practical Tips

Encourage your child to make to-do lists and mark upcoming events on the calendar.
Create the right environment. The child remembers better what is interesting to him and what he is already familiar with. Therefore, if you want your child to remember something from the field of music, create an appropriate environment at home: play on musical instruments, go to concerts with your child, read books about great composers to him.

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It turns out that this is absolutely normal. More recently, scientists have been able to find biological mechanisms for this kind of forgetting, which in scientific circles is called "childhood amnesia." Although children use their memory to acquire new information, few adults can remember events in their lives that happened before they were three.

Emory University was able to show that at the age of seven, these early memories are erased from memory. This phenomenon is called childhood amnesia. Magazine Memory published a study in which researchers interviewed children as young as three years of age about past events in their lives. Various subgroups of this group of children were then tested for their ability to recall these memories again at ages five, six, seven, eight, and nine.

"Our work is the first experimental demonstration of the onset of childhood amnesia," says Patricia Bauer, psychologist and head of the study. "We recorded the children's memories and then followed them into their future to find the moment when they would forget it all." This work is aimed at studying how autobiographical memory changes during childhood and adolescence. "Understanding how autobiographical memory develops is incredibly important for a person's understanding of himself and his psyche," says Bauer. “The way you remember yourself in the past is how you understand who you are today.”

Scientists have long known from conversations with adults that the earliest memories begin around the age of three. Sigmund Freud coined the term childhood amnesia to describe this loss of childhood memories. However, in recent years, evidence suggests that while children use memory to learn language and explore the world around them, they still lack the complete architecture of neural tissue that is needed to form more complex forms of memory. Instead of relying on interviews with adults, as has been done in previous childhood amnesia studies, the Emory University researchers wanted to study the formation of early autobiographical memory, and also to understand at what age all this is forgotten.

The experiment began by recording conversations with 83 three-year-old children, during which their mothers or fathers asked them about six events that had happened in the lives of these children over the past few months, such as going to the zoo or having a birthday party. “We asked parents to talk to their children the way they usually do,” Bauer says. She gives an example: "Mom might ask, 'Remember when we went to the cafe for your birthday?' She will add: “You ate pizza, right?”. The child may begin to remember details about going to a cafe or change the subject by saying something like: “Zoo!”.

After recording these basic memories, the researchers spoke to the children a few years later and asked them to recall events they discussed at the age of three. While children aged 5-7 years could remember 63 to 72% of events, those children who were 8-9 years old only remembered about 35%. “One of the unexpected results was that although five- and six-year-olds remembered a higher percentage of events, their accounts of them were less complete,” says Bauer. “Older children recalled fewer events, but in much more detail.”

The reason for this phenomenon may be that memories that are stored longer have more details associated with them, and more developed language skills give the older child the opportunity to better develop their memory and reinforce memories.

"Children forget events faster than adults because they don't yet have the full neurological processes needed to put together all the pieces of information that make up autobiographical memory," Bauer explains. She uses the pasta analogy to explain the difference between a child's and an adult's memory. “Memories are like orzo pasta,” she says, referring to pasta the size of rice grains, “little bits to remember.”

The brain of a small child is like a colander with large holes, trying to store these little bits of memory. “Adults don’t use a colander, but a fine mesh to keep memories,” Bauer adds. Bauer now wants to take a closer look at the age at which a person receives an adult memory system, she believes that this occurs somewhere between 9 years old and entering college. She adds: “We want to know more about the period when 'colander' changes to 'fine net'. Between the ages of 9 and 18 lies a huge "desert island" for our knowledge of how memory is formed."

We still know very little about memory and early development brain, but recent research has led to a number of new discoveries. Thus, the so-called declarative, explicit (long-term) memory was found in infants - memorization of the mother's voice. Babies reacted through emotions. As soon as mom spoke, they began to smile and calm down. It is not known when the fetus begins to recognize the mother's voice in the uterus, but this is the very first place where his memory begins to absorb information. Those difficult nine months when you are carrying and nursing a child are actually your first chance to start talking to him. Dr. Spencer also explains the difference between semantic and declarative memory. Babies who cry for their mother to feed them use semantic, unconscious memory to help them survive. Declarative memory is conscious, based on observation and knowledge.

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About three to seven years old

Early memory and brain development is very important before the age of five. The brain at this age is so plastic that this is the best time to learn as it can remember just about anything. The more you repeat, the more your children will repeat. Dr. Spencer recommends repetition and regimen for children 3 to 7 years old. This allows them to categorize things and translate them into long-term memory. The more often you try to remember something, the easier it is to pull it out of memory later. Children with whom parents talk learn the ability to memorize and recall early. They are sometimes able to remember stories after the first or second reading thanks to a regimen that includes regular bedtime reading, Pop Sugar research cites.

Seven to ten years

At the age of 7-10 years, when children go to school, there is a rapid development of the hippocampus (part of the limbic system of the brain, which is involved in the mechanisms of the formation of emotions, memory consolidation (that is, the transition of short-term memory to long-term memory) and the ability to remember. The child begins to more effectively organize and store information more logically, which is why most people have a lot of memories starting around the third grade.

Therefore, up to three years, parents should remember and write down the most interesting things that happen to your child in order to impress him at about 10 years old with how much he could and knew how to do in infancy.

answers:

What was your first childhood memory? I remember how during lunch in kindergarten they brought us six apples for dessert - one for each child who was sitting at the table. But I wanted the sweetest apple, so, without hesitation, I bit them all - and chose the most delicious.

I was about three years old. Only 5% percent of people remember themselves before this age. And our memories up to 6-7 years can usually be counted on the fingers. Psychologists call this phenomenon “infantile amnesia.”

Like many discoveries in psychology, this belongs to the controversial psychologist Sigmund Freud. Talking with his patients, he noticed that most of them cannot remember themselves at a young age, while if you ask about the period after six years, the number of memories increases dramatically.

Why do we remember childhood so poorly?

While scientists and psychologists have not come to a single version, there are several theories about what causes infantile amnesia.

Some scientists believe that a child cannot retain memories because he has not yet become an independent person, has not separated himself from the environment, and does not know that from what he has experienced is his experience. Psychologist Hark Hawn conducted an experiment: he asked children to hide a toy animal in his laboratory. After two weeks, he asked the kids about where they put the toy. Only those children who already recognized themselves in the mirror (this simple psychological test helps determine whether a child's self has developed) told the scientist where the animal lay. The rest did not remember where they put the toy.

Researchers Gabriel Simcock and Harleen Hein published a study in the journal Psychological Science in 2002 that found that remembering events in children is closely related to language skills. Because young children are not fluent in language, they cannot "code" what is happening in their lives into memories.

How then do children not forget who their parents are, what their names are, where their home is?
A special type of memory, semantic memory, is responsible for the preservation of this information. It is a type of long-term memory for storage general concepts about the world, rules and regulations, information about the people around, and the knowledge that a chocolate bar is on the top shelf, and for my birthday my parents promised to buy a designer.

“The problem is not that children cannot form memories, but that they form them in the short-term memory zone,” says Toronto scientist Paul Frankland. - When I was doing research on the phenomenon of childhood amnesia, I constantly turned to my four-year-old daughter for help. I asked her questions about the places we were two or three months ago, and she told what she remembers, and in some detail. But I know that in four years she won't remember it."

Canadian researchers confirm - young children remember their early childhood better than adults. They asked 140 children aged 3 to 13 to describe their three earliest memories and repeated the survey two years later. Of the 50 youngest participants in the study, who were between 4 and 6 at the time of the first contact with scientists (and, accordingly, 6-8 at the time of the second survey), only five children named the same memories as the earliest. Most toddlers have forgotten what they told about themselves before. Whereas, of older children, more than 30% reproduced the same memorable moments as two years before.

Frankland's research focused on the workings of the hippocampus, part of the brain's limbic system, which is a kind of "transport company" for transporting and archiving our memories.

We are all born with an underdeveloped hippocampus - it takes several years for it to tune in to work. And while this area of the brain is "under development," our memories are stored in episodic memory, the "stores" of which are scattered over the entire surface of the cortex, in other words, the cerebral cortex. Auditory memories are deposited on the lateral surfaces of the cortex, while visual memories are deposited on the back surface. Patricia Baier of the University of Atlanta advises to imagine these areas as flowers - then it turns out that our entire brain is a large flower meadow. And the hippocampus is needed to collect a bouquet of flowers.

Frankland explains: the hippocampus, starting to work in full force, too busy transporting and archiving the current life of the child, he has no time to be distracted and deal with the affairs of bygone days. Just as an accountant won't check five years ago during an annual report, the hippocampus doesn't waste energy making connections to our earliest childhood memories, instead focusing on remembering as much of our life today as possible.

A Canadian scientist proved his theory on rats. He took some mice, which normally have the same long-term memory problems as children, and with the help of drugs slowed the formation of new neural connections in the hippocampus. The mice, which previously forgot the right “way” in the maze to the cheese for several days, were able to retain this memory for a long time and successfully found a treat after weeks. Freed from current tasks, their hippocampus found the resources to move the memory of the right road to cheese from short-term memory to long-term memory. Soon, the scientist plans to test his theory on children with cancer - one of the effects of the drugs they are prescribed is to slow down the formation of neural connections in the hippocampus.

Freud believed that the phenomenon of childhood amnesia is associated with the need to erase traumatic childhood events from memory. Modern scientists still do not know why early memories do not find a place in our memory store, but they have figured out when they begin to fade.

A recent study by Patricia Baier and Marina Larkina showed that the phenomenon of childhood amnesia "activates" at the age of 7 years. They recorded mothers talking to three-year-olds about the last six highlights in a child's life - a visit to the zoo, the first day of kindergarten, and so on. After some time, the researchers contacted the families again and asked the children about their recollection of the six events. Since the goal of the study was to determine at what age we forget our childhood, the scientists talked to different children from the test group at different ages - with some at five years old, with others at six, seven, eight, nine. Thus, they were able to record how much information at what age children can reproduce.

It turned out that the guys who were 5-7 years old at the time of the survey remembered 60% of what happened to them at the age of three. Whereas those who were spoken to at 8-9 years old could reproduce no more than 40%.

As another group of Canadian scientists led by Dr. Petersen found out, the formation of childhood memories is also influenced by the environment in which a child grows up. In 2009, he conducted a massive experiment involving 225 Canadian children and 113 Chinese children aged 8, 11 and 14. They were asked to write as many memories of their childhood as possible in four minutes. Children from Canada were able to remember twice as much of what happened to them in childhood as Chinese children, while they remembered themselves, on average, six months younger. Interestingly, most of their memories were related to their own experiences, while children from China were more reminiscent of family and group activities.

This study showed that how well we remember childhood (and what exactly we remember) is influenced by our environment. In general, our early childhood memories tend to be more visual than auditory, and more often positive than negative.

To help your child retain the memory, you need to discuss what happened in as much detail as possible. Do not tell the child the facts, for the formation of memories it is much more effective to push the baby himself to tell about what happened. Remember when we went to the zoo? What did you see there? What color was the lion's fur? What sounds did the gorilla make?

Your child may not remember feeding fish in the Maldives when they grow up, but regular discussion of your adventures together enriches your child's vocabulary, builds self-confidence, teaches you to cooperate and brings you closer.

Photo - photobank Lori