A recent study in the Psychological Science journal asked 6,641 residents in the U.K. to describe in writing their first memory, and the age they were in that memory. Around 40% of people found out that that memory is probably false.
It might seem dismissive to assume that these memories are false, but memory researchers have good reason to conclude that people aren’t truly remembering being a baby. Research on infantile amnesia, the official term for the phenomenon in which we forget things that happened to us as babies and young children, has shown that it’s close to impossible to retain declarative memories at that young age.
Check It Out: A Baby’s First Memory is Likely False
