ed to report their earliest memories and the date. There are several factors contributing to the unreliability of this data. In a self-report method, people often have difficulty pinpointing what their earliest memory is and even more difficulty getting an accurate date. Verification of the memories is also a problem since it is nearly impossible to design and conduct a study that observes the initial experience to compare with the subsequent recall. The experience reported by a participant can often be checked with another family member but their memories are also prone to errors. In this field there are also many other confounding variables that experimenters must try minimize. One such variable is the family specific knowledge that a volunteer has accumulated over the course of their life. Loftus, (1993) suggested that early childhood memories are greatly influenced by one’s amassed, family knowledge. For example, a participant who knows that his or her cousin was closely involved in their upbringing is likely to guess that he or she was present at an important event without any actual memory of the fact. Contributing factors to this are family stories, photographs, home movies, etc. The variance of memories between participants also makes it hard to convert what is reported into significant terms. For example, my earliest memory is from when I was about four years old and my grandmother gave me a piece of amethyst in a wooden quart basket similar to one you buy berries in. This information given its degree of accuracy is quite difficult to generalize since every other person will recount a unique story. A method used by experimenters to compensate for this is the targeting of a specific, datable event common to many individuals. In the 1993 experiment by Usher and Neisser, these ‘target events’ consisted of the birth of a younger sibling, a hospitalization, the death of a family member and a family move. The use of targeted recall has helped solve one problem with infantile amnesic research but as we will see there are still many problems with the experimental evidence that has been gathered. Experimental Evidence: Usher and Neisser conducted one of the most influential studies in the field of childhood amnesia in 1993. The purpose of this experiment was to improve on the self-report studies done in the past and to examine the relationship between the nature of the events and the age at which they can be remembered. They used a specific questioning method in a between-groups study of adults’ memories relating to each of the four aforementioned ‘target’ events. They found that the earliest age that these events could be recalled was two for the sibling birth and hospitalization and three for the death and move. They also found no sex differences for the data as proposed by some earlier experiments (Dudycha & Dudycha, 1941). The memories were verified by the participants’ mothers and judged as mostly accurate. These results suggest that the earliest memory recalled in adulthood will vary depending on the significance and or understanding of the event. The birth of a sibling is especially relevant for a young child because of all the discussion and anticipation preceding the birth. This event usually includes many changes in the everyday life for the child and is therefore more likely to be remembered. In comparison, a death is not well understood by a young child and usually will not be as easy to remember. The high levels of emotion (and pain) are said to account for the preservation of the hospitalization memories. This study has been cited as showing evidence for adult memory for events that occurred at the age of two, which is earlier than previous studies suggested. The evidence presented in this study must be carefully considered before making any conclusions. The number of participants who responded positively to the sibling birth questions was few and many were unverified. It has been suggested that the

Some topics in this essay:
Haden Adam, Childhood Amnesia, Research Limitations, McKee Squire, Howe Courage, Usher Neisser, Usher Neisser’s, Dudycha Dudycha, Eacott Crawley, Fivush Schwarzmueller, childhood amnesia, family knowledge, childhood memories, usher neisser, howe courage, empirical evidence, human memory, recalled adulthood, events remembered, earliest memory, howe courage 1997, study fivush haden, usher neisser 1993, fivush haden adam, cause childhood amnesia,