Fictional first memories

Akhtar, S, Justice, LV ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3394-2283, Morrison, CM and Conway, MA, 2018. Fictional first memories. Psychological Science, 29 (10), pp. 1612-1619. ISSN 0956-7976

Preview

Text PubSub10917_Justice.pdf - Post-print Download (480kB) | Preview

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
Volume:	29
Number:	10
ISSN:	0956-7976
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1177/0956797618778831 DOI
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	01 May 2018 11:23
Last Modified:	26 Jan 2021 16:24
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/33400

Actions (login required)

Edit View

Statistics

Views

Downloads