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CHILDHOOD AMNESIA SOFTWARE
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These are the memories that are lost in Alzheimer's disease or aging-related memory impairment. They are also known as explicit memories because they require conscious recollection ( Graf and Schacter, 1985).

Declarative memories include both the experience of specific things, people, and events of a given time and place (episodic memories), and general knowledge about the world (semantic memories). How do we develop our abilities to learn and remember facts, people, things, relationships, and places? These memories define our identities they store autobiographical episodes that can be consciously declared, and are therefore termed declarative memories. The long-lasting influence of episodic infantile experiences and the paradox of infantile amnesia

CHILDHOOD AMNESIA HOW TO

We propose that infantile amnesia reflects a developmental critical period during which the learning system is learning how to learn and remember. Here, with a particular focus on the hippocampal memory system, we review the literature and discuss new evidence obtained in rats that illuminates the paradox of infantile amnesia. It remains unclear how a brain that rapidly forgets, or is not yet able to form long-term memories, can exert such a long-lasting and important influence. Although early memories are inaccessible to adults, early-life events, such as neglect or aversive experiences, can greatly impact adult behavior and may predispose individuals to various psychopathologies. It has been suggested that infantile amnesia is due to the underdevelopment of the infant brain, which would preclude memory consolidation, or to deficits in memory retrieval.

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Harlene will present two lectures at 12.30pm and 6pm on Thursday 1 May in Wellington as part of the Royal Society of New Zealand’s 10x10 series to mark the 20th anniversary of the Marsden Fund.Infantile amnesia, the inability of adults to recollect early episodic memories, is associated with the rapid forgetting that occurs in childhood. While Harlene is still an active researcher and has received a number of Marsden grants, she is also the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Otago, and Ruth Beran speaks with her in her office in the Clocktower building. Which means that our early memories probably go unretrieved and unexpressed and are eventually lost.

CHILDHOOD AMNESIA SOFTWARE

What she has found is that while the hardware and software are in place for infants to store and retrieve memories, these memories are highly specific, so it may be difficult if not impossible for early memories to be retrieved by cues that were not part of the original experience. Some of the tasks that Harlene and her team have developed involve a large train track, a treasure hunt in a sandbox and the incredible shrinking machine ( pictured below). To do so, she has used a number of unique nonverbal techniques because the infants and children being studied are often unable to speak or explain in words what they remember. Harlene Hayne from the University of Otago has been trying to understand the mechanisms responsible for this phenomenon by studying memory development during infancy and early childhood. This inability to recall experiences from our infancy and early childhood is known as childhood amnesia. While our early childhood experiences have a formative impact on our development, very few people have memories of events earlier than the age of three or four. From left to right: Harlene Hayne, and a treasure hunt in the sandbox

Childhood amnesia