Fictional first memories

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Akhtar, S., Justice, L.V. ORCID: 0000-0003-3394-2283, Morrison, C.M. and Conway, M.A., 2018. Fictional first memories. Psychological Science, 29 (10), pp. 1612-1619. ISSN 0956-7976

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618778831

Abstract

In a large-scale survey 6641 respondents provided descriptions of their first memory, age-at-encoding (AaE), and completed various memory judgments and ratings. In good agreement with many other studies, where mean AaE of earliest memories is usually found to fall somewhere in the first half of the third year of life, the mean AaE here was3.2 years. The established view is that the distribution around mean AaE is truncated with very few or no memories dating to the preverbal period, i.e. below about two years of age. However, we found that 2487 first memories (nearly 40% of the entire sample) dated to an AaE of two years and younger with 893 dating to one year and younger. We discuss how such improbable, fictional, first memories could have arisen and contrast them with more probable first memories, those with an AaE of three years and older.

Item Type:

Journal article

Alternative Title:

First memories [running head]

Publication Title:

Psychological Science

Creators:

Akhtar, S., Justice, L.V., Morrison, C.M. and Conway, M.A.

Publisher:

Sage

Date:

1 October 2018