My 5-year-old son makes comments on when he was younger and behaved similar to my eight-month-old. He looks at me will sincerity and pride, and says “sissy still wears diapers, but I don’t because I can go potty by myself!” He often emphasizes how he remembers key features of when he was a baby, like when he made his first laugh. Its adorable because he clearly doesn’t remember these events, but he remembers me telling him. In fact, all of our memory before 3-years-old is implicit memory (Wede, 2020).
For the first three years of life our brains are developing rapidly. We do not form the capacity for recording explicit memory for quite some time, meanwhile we absorb tons of information unconsciously (Wede, 2020). This is due to our prefrontal cortex coming online. Up until this point, we encoded things drastically different and therefore cannot actually recall memory from this time period. With this knowledge I chuckle at my sons drop dead serious recollections of how he used to wear diapers.
He seems to remember things that he has heard second hand after 3.5 years old. His brain is cued not by memory but how he has stored and constructed a memory based off of my account of having expressed it. Since memory is an active process, he could very well have imagined himself behaving according to my explanation and thus constructed a memory of himself in diapers. This is called a false memory (Wede, 2020).
At some point since his prefrontal cortex has been up and running, he noticed the emotions of awe as I recounted my memory of something cute that he’s done. Emotions play an important role in autobiographical memory. This is because emotions activate the amygdala and cause us to form flashbulb memories (Wede, 2020). I am wondering if the same goes for false memory. Could my son be so powerfully moved by my emotions recounting a memory that he constructs his own narrative for the event?
References
Wede, Josh. (2020). Course Modules: L09 Everyday Memory and Memory Errors. Retrieved from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2130474/modules