The first thing you remember
"I remember, when I was about three, my mother looking at me in my buggy and smiling at me".
Jan, 13
"I was maybe four. We were driving to our grandma's and our car1. We couldn't get out of the car and I cried. A mechanic came to help us. "
Alice, 12
"I remember I was eating an ice cream when a dog came and took it out of my hand. I cried, I was two, I think. "
Tom, 10
"I remember my first memory is my second birthday. There was a cake with two candles. I couldn't blow the candles out, so my dad did it for me. "
Mike, 15
Most adults remember little about this that happened in their very early childhood, 2, some people think that we aren't really able to form memories before our fourth or fifth birthdays. But scientists carrying out research into early memories have suggested that this is not true. They say that we do form memories at a very young age. However, what we remember about our very early lives seems to change as we3.
Researchers in Canada worked with 140 children aged between four and thirteen. First, they asked their participants to describe their earliest memories. Then they asked them roughly how old they'd been when the event happened. Next, they asked the kids" parents to make sure that the event actually happened. And all the4were written down. The researchers waited for two years before they went back to the children and asked them again, "What's your earliest memory？"
Nearly all the children who were aged between four and seven in the first interview said something very different in the second interview. And when the researchers reminded them of what they'd said the first time, many of the children said, No, that never happened to me. " However, many of the children who were between ten and thirteen at the first interview described exactly the5memory in the second interview. This seems to suggest that our memories change in the early years, but that at around the age of ten, the things that we remember get fixed (固定的).
The researchers are now looking into the question of why children remember certain events and not others. We sometimes think that most first or early memories are about very stressful things that happened to us as children, because had thins stand out in our minds. But in this study, stressful events were only a small percentage of what the children said they remembered. More often, their early memories were happy ones. The researchers are trying to work out why this is the case. We expect the researchers will6 more fascinating things about memories in the near future.
