They were just colorful specks of gravel-the kind you might buy for a fish tank-mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. If a person believes that they have a special memory they remember at that age, it’s more than likely due to source confusion.We called them fairy rocks. In conclusion, not a single person will remember anything that happened to them when they were a baby/infant due to infantile amnesia. Children who are even younger, let's say 3 years old, and they hear the same story about themselves about something they did when they were an infant over and over again, it makes sense why they would put that story into their memory and believe that it was something they experienced and remember doing when they get older This study shows that even at 8 years old children are fairly easy to believe memories that didn’t happen. Each child was interviewed twice about the story they were told and the results concluded that 58% of the children had a partial or false memory about the false story they were told (Otgaar et al., 2012). Then the researchers gave a false story, that the child was in a hot air balloon ride, and have the child tell more about that experience. They would ask them about an event that actually happened, the parents would give the researchers details about their child’s first day of school, and the children would explain more about it. The researcher wanted to see if they could get the children to believe a false memory. There was a study done in the Netherlands on 45 children ages 8-10 years old.

Source confusion doesn’t discriminate on age, anyone can be a victim to it! One person will tell me some interesting information and I’ll tell another person (sometimes even the same person) the information thinking I came up with the information on my own. I’ll admit that source confusion happens to me every so often. Source confusion is when we forget the source of information and misattribute it to our own memory or experience (Murray, 2003). If this information still isn’t convincing enough for you and you “swear” you remember things from your early childhood, well let me introduce you to a little thing called source confusion. When children get older they are able to talk more and talk about different things that happen to them, because of this they will remember the new things that happened to them and forget the old things that happened to them when they were an infant. Since we aren’t able to express the memories we have when we are young, we eventually just forget them, which makes sense.

Forgetting is in fact a critical component of the definition of childhood amnesia” (Bauer,2004). Just think about it, if you experienced a fun event at a young age, but don’t have the ability to communicate about it, how are you going to store it in your memory? It would be very difficult! “If preschoolers and even infants remember unique events over long periods of time, why then as adults are we unable to recall early childhood? The answer likely lies in the complement of remembering, namely, forgetting. It’s really hard for people to remember memories as a young child because young children don’t have a good grasp on language and can’t use word cue’s to help trigger a memory because they don’t know much about language yet. One of the biggest reasons memories as an infant are almost impossible to remember is infantile amnesia, and yes this is an actual thing that happened to you! Before you get upset that your parents never told you you had amnesia when you were an infant, let me break it down for you. Baby brains simply are not yet physiologically capable of forming and storing long-term memories (Murray,2003). What exactly are impossible memories, and how do they happen? Research has long established that as adults we cannot accurately retrieve memories from our infancy and early childhood. I hate to break it to you, but any memories you may think you have before the age of 3 are what scientists like to call “impossible memories”. Many of you may have similar memories like this one, but the real question is- Are they actual memories? I remember throwing up in the restaurant we went to after getting out of the car” (Parker, 2018). I remember feeling something like anxiety (vaguely) and attempting to conceal that I was car sick and that it didn’t work. An example of an early childhood memory that a person remembered as an adult is, “However I do remember getting car sick when we moved to Washington from Texas in 1979 when I was 2 and a half years old. What is the earliest childhood memory you can remember? Some people may find this question to be difficult to think of and others can spew out a memory right away.

Infantile amnesia not happening