'Kids can recall very early memories'

A recent study by the Memorial University of Newfoundland shows that children can recall memories from well before the age of two, but forget most of them later.

Canadian researchers studied about 100 young children aged 4 to 13 and found that younger children could remember memories from as early as 18 months.

Experts at the Memorial University of Newfoundland asked the children to recall three of their earliest memories and the time they happened.

They then checked with their parents to see if the kids were right or not.

The team talked to the same children two years later, asking them the same questions. This time the children had forgotten most of the memories they remembered before and most adults could not recall much from before the age of three or four.

"What surprised us is that we would give these really detailed cues to the children about memories they had told us about two years previously and they would say 'No, that never happened to me'," lead author Dr. Carole Peterson told the state-funded BBC.

A previous study conducted by Dr. Patricia Bauer of the Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, suggested that the reason for the memory loss is that we encode earlier memories in a different way to older ones.