Let’s see what are the development phases that lead to the birth and consolidation of memory, from “addictive” to re -enactment ability
What depends on the ability of a newborn to form those perceptual patterns that are essential to recognize a face known by another, one voice or a situation from other voices and situations? This ability, so important for the establishment of the first emotional relationships, does not depend only on the maturation of sensory channels (i.e. of the auditory, visual, etc.): it is also essential to be able to record an experience, to recognize it and compare it with other similar ones. They are capacities that concern memory and learning, whose simplest and most essential form is the “habitation” (also known as addiction) which allows, from the first days of life, to stop reacting to something already known. It is through the development of the different memory skills that a newborn can form complex patterns, but Memory is not a homogeneous phenomenoneven if a single term is used to define it: remembering may mean from time to time to recognize, evoke, compare the incoming information with the pre -existing ones.
The first forms of memory
The first form of memory that develops in a small child is the “recognition memory“. At the age of 5-6 months An infant can recognize a family object, but this must be present to stimulate memory, since the child is not yet able to recall: the face of the little brother can be recognized when it is in front of the baby, but the pattern of that face cannot be recovered in the memory if the little brother is absent. This first and simplest form of memorization, which involves very short times, becomes more stable between 8 and 12 monthswhen the baby is able to remember an event for longer times, as happens in an adult who manages to keep a telephone number in mind, without having to transcribe it, for a handful of seconds. This form of memory refers to “working memory“And it makes its appearance around 5-6 months, but its presence can go unnoticed because it initially operates for very short periods of time and only later, and gradually stabilizes for increasingly longer times.
Growing, it remembers longer
The critical function of the time in the re -enactment process is clearly evident in the infants aged 8 to 12 months. This is evidenced by several tests conducted with children of this age: in the presence of the child there is an attractive object under one of two different clothes, and then the child is expected for varying times from 1 to 7 seconds, before allowing him to look for him. By observing the same children once a month during their growth, it is noted that The child’s ability to remember where the toy was hidden constantly improves. If at 8 months all children are unable to remember where it is, even after the very short interval of a second, at 1 year everyone finds the toy after a 3 -second interval and the majority succeeds even if the interval is 7. At 18 months the errors are very rare even after a 10 second intervalas a research carried out by the well -known psychologist Jerome Kaga has shown.
Knowing how to compare different schemes
As for the ability to keep in mind a past experience and use it to make a comparison with a different reality (i.e. theability to compare different schemes with each other), it manifests itself towards 11-12 months. Let’s imagine we have a mirror that reflects the image of an object, and we give the children to experience both the object reflected and, separately, a different object. We will discover that while the 8 -month children do not show amazement in front of any of the two objects, the older ones will remain perplexed when the object touched will not correspond to the one seen. To surprise, evidently, the child must have the ability to compare the different information he receives from his two senses.
The ability to recall and the first fears
The ability to recall and hold a scheme in memory is known as “Re -vocation memory“, An aspect of long -term memory that allows you to relate to a discrepant fact compared to an already stored one. This ability allows you to understand the roots of some universal fears who appear in the last months of the first year of life, especially the fear of unknown adults and the fear of separating from family figures. As an unknown person approaches, a 9 month old child studies his face, he automatically recalls the patterns of the faces known to him, compare with them the new scheme, he finds him incongruous and is attacked by uncertainty; As a consequence he can put himself to cry or get away with impairment and look for the parent, which previously did not happen because he did not yet have a long -term memory.
On the basis of these and other experiments, psychologists came to the conclusion that Over a few months, the child passes from the simple recognition of a fact experienced only a few moments before to the ability to recall sensations and realities linked to a further past. The fact that these changes occur in all children more or less at the same age makes you believe that these skills depend on structural transformations which occur in the central nervous system, both at the level of the hippocampus, that is, the nucleus that has the task of connecting the different aspects of a memory (visual, auditors, tactiles …), and at the level of the frontal cortex, which plays a key role in the re -enacting memory.
