Remembering and Forgetting Early Childhood

This book brings together scholarship that contributes diverse and new perspectives on childhood amnesia - the scarcity of memories for very early life events. The topics of the studies reported in the book range from memories of infants and young children for recent and distant life events, to mother-child conversations about memories for extended lifetime periods, and to retrospective recollections of early childhood in adolescents and adults. The methodological approaches are diverse and theoretical insights rich. The findings together show that childhood amnesia is a complex and malleable phenomenon and that the waning of childhood amnesia and the development of autobiographical memory are shaped by a variety of interactive social and cognitive factors. This book will facilitate discussion and deepen an understanding of the dynamics that influence the accessibility, content, accuracy, and phenomenological qualities of memories from early childhood. This book was originally published as a special issue of Memory.