Infantile Amnesia Essay

Early childhood experiences are crucial in shaping personality and psychological functioning into one’s adulthood years in life. Infants’ brains work and develop rapidly, and many memories are being made during the development process. However, many of the memories infants and children make during the first 4 years tend to be forgotten as they grow older. Sigmund Freud was the first psychologist to describe the phenomenon in which people fail to retrieve episodic memories such as specific events from early childhood as infantile amnesia. Freud (1953) explained infantile amnesia by suggesting that one needs to repress memories from infancy due to their inappropriate and traumatic-sexual content. However, contemporary researchers argued with Freud’s trauma theory in explaining infantile amnesia and proposed a number of hypotheses to further clarify the underlying causes of the infantile amnesia phenomenon.

The researchers suggested that by increasing hippocampal neurogenesis in adult rats, the existing memories tended to weaken thereafter and retrieval of contextual fear memories would be difficult. In contrast, when the hippocampal neurogenesis was reduced, the existing memories would be more protected and retrieval of fear memories would be possible afterward. Frankland et al., (2013) discussed the effects of hippocampal neurogenesis on infantile amnesia by comparing guinea pigs to rats or mice. Researchers suggested that guinea pigs are born with most of their neurons complete and don’t experience as much neurogenesis when they are infants as mice and rats. Therefore, they were shown to retain memories of special discrimination as well as adult guinea pigs. This demonstrates that infant guinea pigs do not experience infantile amnesia due to their low levels of postnatal hippocampal