A team of researchers from the University of Bradford, Nottingham Trent University and City, University of London, UK, has conducted a large-scale survey of people’s first memories, finding that nearly 40% of individuals had a first memory which is fictional.
In the large-scale survey by Akhtar et al, 6,641 respondents provided descriptions of their first memory and their age when they encoded that memory, and they completed various memory judgments and ratings. The established view is that the distribution around mean age at encoding is truncated, with very few or no memories dating to the preverbal period, that is, below about two years of age. However, Akhtar et al found that 2,487 first memories (nearly 40% of the entire sample) dated to an age at encoding of two years and younger, with 893 dating to one year and younger. Image credit: Myriam.
Current research indicates that people’s earliest memories date from around 3-3.5 years of age.
However, the new study found that 38.6% of a survey of 6,641 people claimed to have memories from two or younger, with 893 people claiming memories from one or younger.
“We suggest that what a rememberer has in mind when recalling fictional improbably early memories is an episodic-memory-like mental representation consisting of remembered fragments of early experience and some facts or knowledge about their own infancy/childhood,” said study first author Dr. Shazia Akhtar, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bradford.
“Additionally, further details may be non-consciously inferred or added, e.g. that one was wearing nappy when standing in the cot. Such episodic-memory-like mental representations come, over time, to be recollectively experienced when they come to mind and so for the individual they quite simply are ‘memories’ which particularly point to infancy.”
In the study, Dr. Akhtar and colleagues asked participants to detail their first memory along with their age at the time.
In particular, participants were told that the memory itself had to be one that they were certain they remembered. It should not be based on, for example a family photograph, family story, or any source other than direct experience.
From these descriptions the researchers then examined the content, language, nature and descriptive detail of respondents’ earliest memory descriptions, and from these evaluated the likely reasons why people claim memories from an age that research indicates they cannot be formed.
As many of these memories dated before the age of two and younger, they are based on remembered fragments of early experience — such as a pram, family relationships and feeling sad — and some facts or knowledge about their own infancy or childhood which may have been derived from photographs or family conversations.
As a result, what a rememberer has in mind when recalling these early memories is a mental representation consisting of remembered fragments of early experience and some facts or knowledge about their own childhood, instead of actual memories.
Over time, such mental representations come to be recollectively experienced when they come to mind and so for the individual they quite simply are ‘memories’ with content strongly tied to a particular time.
In particular, fictional very early memories were seen to be more common in middle-aged and older adults and about 4 in 10 of this group have fictional memories for infancy.
“In our study we asked people to recall the very first memory that they actually remembered, asking them to be sure that it wasn’t related to a family story or photograph,” said study senior author Professor Martin Conway, from the Department of Psychology at City, University of London.
“When we looked through the responses from participants we found that a lot of these first ‘memories’ were frequently related to infancy, and a typical example would be a memory based around a pram.”
“For this person, this type of memory could have resulted from someone saying something like ‘mother had a large green pram.’ The person then imagines what it would have looked like. Over time these fragments then becomes a memory and often the person will start to add things in such as a string of toys along the top.”
“Crucially, the person remembering them doesn’t know this is fictional. In fact when people are told that their memories are false they often don’t believe it. This partly due to the fact that the systems that allow us to remember things are very complex, and it’s not until we’re five or six that we form adult-like memories due to the way that the brain develops and due to our maturing understanding of the world.”
The findings were published online this week in the journal Psychological Science.
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Shazia Akhtar et al. Fictional First Memories. Psychological Science, published online July 17, 2018; doi: 10.1177/0956797618778831
