At what age do babies start to remember things? Babies have memories from birth

Almost everyone has no memory of how they first came into this world, how they learned to speak, how they learned to walk, and how they grew up. So when did we all start to remember things? In fact, babies have memories from birth.

When do babies start to remember things?

At 2 months old, babies can recognize familiar faces and voices, especially those they see every day. Newborn babies can hear their mother's voice as soon as they are born, and breastfed babies can smell their mother's scent after 1 week. These can be said to be the beginning of baby's memory.

A 3-month-old baby can recognize new pictures and toys that he has seen 1-6 days ago. A 9-month-old baby can remember more details, such as where his favorite toys are placed at home, and can imitate what he learned a week ago, which is delayed imitation - after a certain delay in previous experience, the imitation behavior of the experience appears, which also shows that the baby has a certain ability to recall. He can recall more at 14-18 months. A 1-year-old baby can understand object permanence, and can consciously recall things that happened in the past at the age of 2.

At what age do children start to remember things?

First of all, we should make it clear that when we usually say "remembering things", we mean that we have memories of our childhood after we grow up. It does not mean that children have no memory. In fact, a 2-month-old baby can remember things for 24 hours, and when they are 18 months old, they can remember things for more than 3 months. In order to see when exactly remembering things starts, researchers asked people to recall their childhood experiences and made a graph. It can be seen that people's childhood memories can be divided into clear "two phases". The memory before 2-3 years old is almost zero, and the memory amount increases rapidly from 3-7 years old, but it is still sporadic compared to adults. An interesting point can also be seen from this curve: the memory of six or seven years old is by no means a simple extension of the adult forgetting curve. That is to say, the few memories left in kindergarten are not just because of the long time. The mechanism of forgetting things when you are a child is probably different from that of forgetting things when you are an adult.

Distribution of human autobiographical memory before the age of 10:

There was a very interesting "fire alarm" study in the 1990s. In 1984, a fire alarm suddenly sounded in a children's learning center. The teacher urgently evacuated the children from the building. One class of children was three and a half years old, and the other class was four and a half years old. They sat next to the sand pit and watched the police and firefighters busy inside and outside. The uncles found that it was just someone popping popcorn that set off the alarm. The teacher explained the cause and effect to the children and continued the class. Two weeks later, the researchers called the children back and asked them if they remembered the incident two weeks ago. All the children remembered it, but the three-and-a-half-year-old children recounted it without a beginning or an end. Few people could say that they were in class in the building at the time, and almost no one mentioned that the fire alarm was just because of popcorn. The four-and-a-half-year-old children could completely retell the whole thing.

Seven years later, scientists brought the children back together. The four-and-a-half-year-olds could still clearly recall the entire incident, with one-third of it being particularly well-recited. However, almost none of the three-and-a-half-year-olds could reach the same level of memory, and many of them had forgotten everything at all.

Newborns have memories from birth

Most people think that babies have no memory before the age of 3, but this is not true. For example, after going to the hospital, special smells, sounds or lights, etc., when they start to feel familiar, they will recall the unpleasant experience they had here before, and therefore cry.

Babies have memories from birth, but their way of remembering is quite special. It is usually a conditioned response to conditioned stimuli. For example, they create memories by observing objects around them and making comparisons; they remember their mother's smell through their sense of smell, and they remember their own toys through the touch, etc. These are the secrets of their memory.

When he is born, he can recognize the smell and taste of food that his mother ate while pregnant with him.

Newborns can recognize their mother's voice.

After a few months, he was able to listen to what people around him said and hear some simple words from a series of sounds.

By around 9 months, he can remember specific details, such as an adult demonstrating how to play with a certain toy, and he can remember it for at least a month.

Memories before the age of 3 are not lost; they are deep in our brains, but hidden in some way.

Why are our memories before the age of 3 so shallow?

One important reason why humans lose their memories before the age of three is that the various areas of the cortex have not yet fully matured; another important reason is that the baby has not yet learned the ability to control language, and early memories are generally preserved in non-verbal form.

Therefore, the memories before the age of three that seem to be lost are actually still present in our subconscious mind, but because we were still young at that time, we had not yet learned to express them in words.

Don't think that babies under 3 years old have no memory, they are actually very smart. When you enter their world and understand the characteristics of their memory, you will find more lovely things about babies. In addition, babies have emotional memories in their brains, and they can feel whether you are warm and caring to them or ignoring them.