Remembering and Forgetting Early Childhood

Qi Wang is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. Her research examines individual and cultural mechanisms underlying autobiographical memory. She is the author of The Autobiographical Self in Time and Culture. Sami Gülgöz is Professor of Psychology at Koç University. His past work includes topics varying from text processing to personality. In the last decade, he has concentrated on memory in everyday life, primarily autobiographical memory.

• Introduction: New perspectives on childhood amnesia 1. Manipulating the reported age in earliest memories 2. Looking at the past through a telescope: adults postdated their earliest childhood memories3. Consistency of adults’ earliest memories across two years 4. Thirty-five-month-old children have spontaneous memories despite change of context for retrieval 5. What happened in kindergarten? Mother-child conversations about life story chapters6. Predictors of age-related and individual variability in autobiographical memory in childhood7. Origins of adolescents’ earliest memories 8. Recollection improves with age: children’s and adults’ accounts of their childhood experiences9. The relationship between sociocultural factors and autobiographical memories from childhood: the role of formal schooling 10. Unravelling the nature of early (autobiographical) memory